Gospel  ^  Work 
In  Modern  Life 


ROBERT   WHITAKER 


GIFT  OF 


/ 


^ 


De  6<wl  at  Ulork 

in 

modern  Cife 


Che  Gospel  at  Klerk 

in 

modern  Life 


By 
Robert  ttfbitaker 


Philadelphia 

tbe  Griffith  $  Rowland  Press 

Boston  Chicago 

St.  Louis 


Copyright  1910  by 
A.  J.  ROWLAND,  Secretary 


Published  August,  1910 


PREFATORY   NOTE 

THE  social  influence  of  Christianity  is  being  recog- 
nized to-day  in  a  manner  and  to  a  degree  that  would 
surprise  Christian  workers  of  a  generation  ago.  In 
keeping  with  this  tendency,  the  Baptist  Young 
People's  Union  of  America  has  arranged  its  courses 
of  study  to  provide  for  the  needs  of  young  people 
in  the  direction  of  this  new  emphasis  of  Christian 
thought.  The  purpose  of  this  book  is  to  serve  as 
studies  in  the  Sacred  Literature  Course  in  young 
people's  societies.  The  subject  has  been  chosen 
because  of  its  practical  character,  and  the  relation 
of  its  parts  to  individual  life. 

It  is  a  matter  of  gratification  to  the  Committee  to 
be  able  to  offer  to  young  people's  societies  the  course 
of  studies  in  this  book,  at  the  same  time  so  practical, 
so  timely,  and  so  deeply  interesting.  The  author, 
who  has  given  much  of  his  life  to  a  consideration 
of  the  questions  discussed  and  has  won  for  himself 
a  reputation  for  thoroughness  and  candor,  has 
herein  given  some  of  his  best  thoughts  in  a  most 
pleasing  style. 

The  course  has  been  shortened  in  respect  to  the 
number  of  lessons,  so  that  it  now  consists  of  twelve 
instead  of  twenty  or  twenty-five  as  in  former  years. 

GEORGE  T.  WEBB. 


320255 


TABLE   OF  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGB 

I.  THE  MODERN  CHRISTIAN'S  PROBLEMS..  9 

II.  THE  GOSPEL  THAT  WORKS 20 

III.  DEVELOPMENT,    A    CHRISTIAN'S    FIRST 

DUTY 31 

IV.  THE  GOSPEL  AND   WORSHIP 42 

V.  THE  GOSPEL  AND  HOME  CONDUCT 53 

VI.  THE  GOSPEL  WORKING  IN  THE  CHURCH  64 

VII.  THE  GOSPEL  WORKING  FOR  SOCIAL  BET- 
TERMENT    75 

VIII.  THE  GOSPEL    WORKING    FOR    KINGDOM 

EXPANSION 86 

IX.  THE  GOSPEL'S  MODERN  MIRACLES 96 

X.  THE  GOSPEL  IN  BUSINESS. 107 

XI.  THE  GOSPEL  AND  RECREATIONS 118 

XII.  THE  GOSPEL  AND  HOME  MAKING 129 


THE  GOSPEL  AT  WORK 
IN  MODERN  LIFE 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  MODERN   CHRISTIANAS   PROBLEMS 

IN  the  large  library  room  of  the  Leland  Stanford, 
Jr.,  University,  at  Palo  Alto,  Cal.,  at  almost  any 
hour  of  the  day,  several  score  of  students  may  be 
found  conning  their  lessons,  making  notes,  or 
browsing  over  some  book  just  withdrawn  from  the 
adjacent  shelves.  High  above  them,  on  the  western 
wall,  is  a  large  art-glass  window,  whence  the  light 
falls  upon  the  bowed  heads  of  the  students  from 
the  benignant  face  of  a  medieval  saint,  Thomas  a 
Kempis,  the  reputed  author  of  the  best-known 
book  of  devotional  meditations  which  the  Christian 
centuries  have  produced.  The  garb  and  face  alike 
proclaim  the  monk,  and  the  presence  there  of  the 
great  ascetic's  figure  is  sufficient  reminder  to  those 
at  all  familiar  with  the  words  of  his  confession, 
printed  under  his  picture  in  one  of  the  galleries  of 
the  Old  World :  "  Everywhere  I  sought  quiet,  and 
found  it  nowhere  else  than  in  solitude  and  amongst 
books." 

Could  the  old  monk  himself  take  the  place  for 
an  hour  of  that  calm,  illuminated  face  which,   in 

9 


io          The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

immovable  complacency,  looks  down  upon  the  Stan- 
ford students  of  this  very  modern  world,  after  what 
manner  would  his  meditations  move  to-day?  How 
would  he  write  now  for  the  young  men  and  young 
women  coming  and  going  in  the  reading-room  be- 
low concerning  his  great  theme,  "  The  imitation  of 
Christ  ?  "  Or  what  have  all  the  changes  that  have 
come  to  pass  in  the  four  hundred  and  forty  years 
since  he  died  to  do  with  the  working  of  the  gospel 
in  the  lives  of  men? 

It  may  be  granted  that  it  was  no  dull  age  in 
which  Thomas  a  Kempis  lived,  and  that  his  was  not 
an  average  life.  'He  was  contemporary  with  John 
Hus,  and  Jerome  of  Prague,  and  Savonarola,  men 
of  very  different  temper  from  his,  borne  through  a 
far  more  tempestuous  career.  Gutenberg,  to  whom 
the  invention  of  the  art  of  printing  is  generally 
allowed,  shared  the  century  with  a  Kempis,  and 
printed  his  first  Bible  about  twenty  years  before 
a  Kempis  died.  It  was  the  age  of  the  "  Maid  of 
Orleans  "  in  France,  of  "  The  Wars  of  the  Roses  " 
in  England,  of  the  famous  or  infamous  Medici 
family  in  Italy,  and  the  closing  years  of  a  Kempis 
saw  the  fateful  marriage  of  Ferdinand  and  Isabella 
in  Spain.  With  none  of  these  things  did  a  Kempis 
concern  himself,  and  they  might  have  happened 
upon  another  planet  so  far  as  the  great  mystic  had 
to  do  with  them.  But  whether  we  think  of  the 
monk,  a  Kempis,  or  of  the  martyr,  Hus,  or  of  the 
soldier-saint,  Joan  of  Arc,  or  of  any  other  of  the 


The  Modern  Christian's  Problems  II 

remembered  figures  of  four  and  more  centuries  ago, 
as  looking  down  from  that  sunset  window  upon  the 
youth  of  our  time,  we  are  thinking  of  men  and 
women  almost  as  far  away  from  the  things  that 
interest  and  perplex  us  as  we  seem  ourselves  to  the 
sober  minded  among  us  from  actual  intercourse 
and  exchange  of  ideas  with  the  hypothetical  in- 
habitants of  Mars. 

We  are  not  seeking  quiet  now,  and  few  of  us  are 
seeking  solitude.  Our  very  books  have  become  the 
clamorous  voices  of  the  unrest  of  our  day.  Our 
ideal  of  the  saintly  life  has  changed.  We  reverence 
the  mystics,  in  art  glass,  but  our  own  heart's  saints 
are  the  men  of  strenuous  life.  We  read  the  words 
of  a  Kempis  somewhat  as  we  look  upon  the  window 
there,  touched  with  the  glory  of  the  westering  sun, 
with  a  certain  sensitive  enjoyment  of  its  rich  color- 
ing and  artistic  lines,  feeling  in  a  way  the  delicate 
hues  of  his  words  and  the  fine  tracery  of  his  thought. 
But  we  turn  from  it  all  to  our  tasks  which  are 
lighted  after  all  by  the  colder  light  that  flows  in 
through  unadorned  windows,  or  perchance  the 
nearer  glow  of  the  electric  light.  And  sometimes 
the  "  imitation  of  Christ "  seems  itself  as  unreal  as 
the  figures  wrought  in  art  glass  yonder  on  the 
walls,  and  as  far  removed  from  the  conditions  of 
our  ordinary  life  as  the  glowing  electric  bulb  from 
the  shadowy  cell  of  the  medieval  monk. 

It  is  fortunate  for  our  faith  that  there  is  a  greater 
distance  between  Jesus  and  a  Kempis  than  there  is 


12          The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

between  a  Kempis  and  us.  At  first  the  distance 
seems  to  our  disadvantage,  for  in  point  of  time 
Jesus  is  farther  away  yet.  But  not  in  point  of  con- 
tact with  our  lives.  Jesus  was  no  ascetic.  He  lived 
his  life  emphatically  among  men.  He  was  with 
them  at  the  wedding  feast,  and  dined  familiarly 
with  them  at  the  banquet  table.  The  plowman,  the 
sower,  and  the  harvester,  the  fisherman,  and  all  the 
common  round  of  daily  toil  and  ordinary  interests 
furnished  him  with  the  imagery  of  his  speech.  The 
common  people  heard  him  gladly  because  he  was 
of  their  number  and  kept  always  his  intimacy  with 
their  lives.  He  was  called  "  a  wine-bibber  and  a 
glutton  "  by  reason  of  his  easy  and  natural  associ- 
ations with  the  rich,  and  "  a  friend  of  publicans  and 
sinners  "  by  reason  of  his  democratic  associations 
with  the  poor.  Jesus  was  preeminently  a  "  mixer  " 
among  men.  This  was  more  than  half  of  his  offen- 
siveness  to  the  professionally  religious  of  his  day. 
It  is  increasingly  his  attractiveness  to  the  men  and 
women  of  our  time  who  have  discernment  enough 
to  pierce  the  thinner  atmosphere  of  religious  pro- 
fessionalism now. 

Yet,  even  Jesus  is  far  away  from  the  modern 
Christian's  problems  if  we  do  not  guard  ourselves 
as  to  what  we  mean  by  the  "  imitation  of  Christ." 
It  is  not  enough  that  we  do  not  mean  an  imitation 
of  a  Kempis  rather  than  Christ.  It  is  easy  enough 
to  see  that  the  issue  is  not  for  us,  How  shall  we 
live  the  life  of  Thomas  a  Kempis  to-day?  There 


The  Modern  Christian  s  Problems  13 

may  have  been  much  to  excuse  it  and  justify  it  in 
the  age  in  which  a  Kempis  lived.  But  neither  for 
that  age  nor  for  any  other  age  was  it  the  life  which 
Jesus  lived.  It  was  radically  different  in  principle. 
The  ideal  of  a  Kempis  was  isolation.  The  ideal  of 
Jesus  was  incarnation.  Thomas  a  Kempis  did  not 
imitate  Jesus.  He  did  but  imitate  certain  moods  and 
tenses  of  the  Christian  life.  And  there  is  danger 
even  in  the  imitation  of  Jesus  himself  if  we  mistake 
the  letter  of  his  example  for  the  lordship  of  his 
spirit  and  his  life.  Jesus'  teaching  is  just  as  vital 
for  us  in  substance  as  it  was  for  the  men  and  women 
with  whom  he  shared  the  fashions  and  customs  of  a 
distant  day.  His  was  the  timelessness  of  absolute 
truth.  It  is  part  of  his  timelessness  that  he  spoke 
little  of  the  "  problems  "  of  his  own  generation.  But 
his  life  was,  nevertheless,  of  that  generation.  The 
very  humanness  with  which  he  lived,  and  the  fact 
that  he  spoke  not  according  to  the  abstractions  of 
mystics  or  philosophers,  but  in  the  terms  of  every- 
day life  as  he  actually  saw  it,  and  shared  it,  compel 
us  to  go  behind  the  letter  of  his  saying  and  doing 
if  we  are  to  translate  his  truth  into  a  like  union  with 
the  life  of  our  day.  He  saved  the  life  of  his  age  by 
entering  into  it  and  becoming  part  of  it.  We  shall 
not  save  the  life  of  our  generation  by  getting  away 
from  it  in  the  effort  to  realize  closer  fellowship  with 
him  through  an  impossible  union  with  conditions 
which  have  long  since  passed  away.  His  ideal  for 
us  is  neither  the  isolation  of  the  medieval  monk,  nor 


14          The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

the  imitation  of  the  forms  of  his  own  earthly  min- 
istry, but  the  transfusion  of  his  life  into  us  and 
through  us  into  the  forms  and  customs  and  insti- 
tutions of  our  day.  Thomas  a  Kempis  would  make 
candles  of  us  all,  burning  in  golden  candlesticks  of 
secluded  devotion  before  the  altars  of  a  dead  Christ. 
Jesus  would  make  of  every  one  of  us  a  "  live  wire  " 
in  our  own  generation,  electric  with  the  divine  grace 
and  goodness  which  were  in  him,  carrying  the 
might  and  mystery  of  the  heavens  to  the  humblest 
hamlet  in  the  land  with  a  glow  which  the  palaces 
of  the  past  could  not  command,  and  drawing  from 
every  river  and  rivulet  of  the  rushing  life  of  our 
time  the  power  which  men  of  old  worshiped  with 
fearful  faces  afar  off  as  it  flashed  and  thundered  in 
the  skies,  that  we  may  minister  of  and  through  that 
power  to  the  enlargement  and  enrichment  of  all  the 
life  of  the  world. 

Therefore,  the  foremost  problem  of  the  modern 
Christian  is  the  Christian's  first  problem  in  every 
generation — to  translate  the  timeless  truth  of  Jesus, 
not  the  temporary  forms  of  that  truth,  into  the  most 
convincing  and  commanding  terms  of  contemporary 
life.  And  it  is  especially  the  problem  of  youth,  be- 
cause to  youth  especially  belongs  the  life  of  to-day. 

The  problem  has  always  been  both  one  and  many. 
It  was  never  so  manifold  and  complex  as  it  is  to-day. 
Life  has  always  met  youth  and  faith  with  the  chal- 
lenge of  change  and  enlargement.  But  the  change 
was  never  so  rapid  and  so  varied,  and  the  enlarge- 


The  Modern  Christian's  Problems  15 

ment  never  so  trying  to  judgment  and  courage  as 
is  the  case  in  this  century  in  which  we  live.  Often 
and  again  there  has  been  need  of  intellectual  re- 
adjustment to  meet  the  conditions  of  expanding 
knowledge.  It  was  even  before  the  beginnings  of 
Christianity  that  one  wrote  the  familiar  complaint, 
"  Of  making  many  books  there  is  no  end,  and  much 
study  is  a  weariness  of  the  flesh."  Yet,  for  every 
student  the  world  knew  then,  it  knows  a  thousand 
now,  and  we  burn  up  more  printed  matter  every 
morning  in  starting  our  fires  than  all  the  laborious 
copyists  of  that  ancient  day  could  write  down  from 
year's  end  to  year's  end.  If  the  discoveries  of  a 
Galileo  seemed  to  the  men  of  the  medieval  world 
to  threaten  the  very  foundations  of  the  faith,  what 
of  the  vastly  more  disturbing  upheavals  which  have 
broken  the  crust  of  every  province  of  education  in 
our  time,  and  tumbled  down  great  cities  of  pains- 
takingly builded  traditions  wherein  men  have  lived 
and  wrought  for  centuries?  If  the  world  of 
thought  was  stirred  to  restlessness  when  the  pio- 
neers of  research  went  forth  a  day's  journey  with 
their  ox-cart  conveyances  into  the  unexplored 
regions  beyond  their  Alleghanies  what  of  convic- 
tion and  conjecture  now  when  men  pass  from  sea  to 
sea  within  a  week  and  investigation  goes  with  the 
swiftness  and  force  of  a  modern  express  train,  or 
challenges  the  lightness  and  celerity  of  the  birds  in 
their  own  atmosphere?  Never  was  the  problem 
so  acute  as  it  is  to-day  for  those  who  would  keep 


1 6          The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

their  faith  and  would  keep  also  abreast  of  knowl- 
edge. Never  was  it  so  easy  to  throw  old  truth 
away  by  reason  of  the  pressure  of  new  opinioa 
Never  did  the  fellowship  with  Jesus  require  such 
nice  discrimination  as  it  does  now  on  the  intellectual 
side  between  the  changing  terms  in  which  we  think 
of  all  externals  from  documents  to  doctrines  and 
the  essential  changelessness  of  all  that  pertains  to 
the  inner  life  of  truth.  Yet,  nowhere  is  the  gospel 
more  triumphantly  at  work  in  modern  life  than  in 
demonstrating  the  difference  between  faith  and  in- 
tellectual form. 

Nor  was  ever  the  problem  of  poverty  or  plenty  so 
pressing  as  it  is  to-day.  There  is  more  in  this 
modern  world  to  tempt  the  young  Christian,  espe- 
cially, to  forsake  the  "  mind  of  Christ "  for  mam- 
monism  than  even  the  ages  of  buccaneering  knew. 
For  our  necessities  are  more  than  the  luxuries  of 
our  fathers,  and  their  affluence  is  less  than  compe- 
tence for  us.  Not  only  are  the  manifest  rewards  im- 
measurably greater  for  the  successful  now,  but 
the  area  of  success  has  enlarged  quite  as  much  as 
the  area  of  education,  and  the  common  man  has 
access  to  the  adventures  of  wealth  beyond  even  the 
degree  of  his  access  to  the  once  exclusive  fields  of 
knowledge.  Mammonism  is  not  only  more  demo- 
cratic than  it  was  of  old,  hobnobbing  now  with  all 
classes  and  conditions  of  men,  and  holding  out  an 
inviting  hand  to  the  street  urchin  as  well  as  to  the 
prince,  but  mammonism  is  more  respectable  and 


The  Modern  Christian's  Problems  17 

much  more  religious.  Nowhere  is  the  problem  of 
adjustment  between  a  faithful  following  of  the 
Christ  and  participation  in  the  life  of  this  present 
world  more  difficult  to-day  than  it  is  with  respect 
to  the  Christian's  attitude  toward  wealth.  We  have 
taken  the  rich  young  ruler  into  the  church,  and  are 
holding  him  up  as  an  example  of  achievement  and 
rare  opportunity.  Yet  the  gospel  was  never  more 
mightily  at  work  for  the  overthrow  of  mammonism 
than  it  is  in  the  hearts  of  multitudes  of  Christians 
to-day. 

The  problem  of  pleasure,  like  the  problem  of 
profit,  is  vastly  increased  and  intensified.  The  field 
of  knowledge  has  not  more  enlarged  than  the  field 
of  what  is  popularly  called  fun.  There  is  no 
more  serious  obstacle  to  the  growth  of  the  king- 
dom of  God  among  us  than  the  levity  of  the  age. 
Religion  has  profited  by  the  growth  of  cheerfulness. 
But  counterfeit  cheerfulness  is  more  costly  to  a 
people  than  counterfeit  currency.  A  vast  amount 
of  our  humor  is  not  humor  at  all,  but  vicious  vul- 
garity, as  witness  our  Sunday  supplements.  Recre- 
ation is  the  next  neighbor  to  regeneration,  as  the 
very  form  of  the  word  implies,  but  to  confound  it 
with  dissipation  is  as  dangerous  as  to  mistake  a 
reef  for  the  entrance  to  a  harbor.  One  of  the 
largest  problems  of  the  Christian  life  of  the  day, 
and  preeminently  of  the  young  Christian  life  of 
this  generation,  is  the  redemption  of  the  vast  new 
provinces  which  have  been  added  within  recent 


i8         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

times  to  the  once  comparatively  meager  and  barren 
domain  of  diversion  and  delight. 

And  how  is  the  whole  field  of  conscience  ex- 
panded to-day!  What  problems  the  growth  of 
modern  industrialism  presents  to  the  man  who 
would  determine  his  ways  by  the  spirit  of  Christ. 
How  easy  is  it  to  be  individually  honest,  and  kind, 
and  even  generous,  and  to  be  socially  void  of 
Christian  conscience  and  as  fractionally  irrespon- 
sible as  was  the  savage  in  his  primitive  individual 
way.  What  bigger  problem  has  any  age  had  than 
this  of  developing  a  co-operative  Christian  con- 
science? And  let  it  not  be  thought  that  this  prob- 
lem concerns  the  employer  more  than  it  does  the 
employee,  the  man  who  sells  his  brains  for  big  div- 
idends more  than  the  man  who  sells  his  body  for  a 
"  full  dinner  pail."  This  is  peculiarly  the  problem 
of  our  time.  The  effective  working  of  the  gospel 
in  almost  any  of  us  to-day  is  conditioned  to  a 
degree  the  world  has  never  known  before  upon  the 
development  of  a  social  conscience  that  shall  be 
purely  and  profoundly  Christian. 

These  are  the  larger  lines  of  the  problem  of  in- 
terpreting the  gospel  in  the  terms  of  our  times.  In 
one  sense  all  these  problems  are  old;  they  were  al- 
ways part  of  the  main  problem.  Yet  are  they  each 
of  them  as  different  from  what  they  were  yesterday 
as  Europe  is  different  from  the  Europe  of  Thomas 
a  Kempis'  day.  And  all  our  problems,  however  old 
in  substance,  are  so  new  in  emphasis  that  they  are 


The  Modern  Christian's  Problems  19 

practically  new  worlds  to  conquer  for  the  Christ. 
If  his  gospel  is  to  win  them  through  us,  we  must 
be  very  sure  that  we  know  what  his  gospel  is. 

*** 
Quiz 

i.  Who  was  Thomas  a  Kempis?  2.  In  what  re- 
spect does  the  monastic  attitude  toward  life  differ 
from  the  method  of  Jesus'  ministry?  3.  What  is 
the  fundamental  problem  of  every  generation  with 
reference  to  Christian  living?  4.  How  does  the  en- 
larging field  of  knowledge  and  research  affect 
Christian  living  to-day?  5.  What  are  the  forces 
which  make  most  for  mammonism  now?  6.  How 
is  the  problem  of  pleasure  affected  by  modern  de- 
velopments? 7.  What  do  you  understand  by  a 
social  conscience? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  What  are  the  dangers  of  pietism?  2.  Is  the 
cheerfulness  of  present-day  Christian  living  as 
compared  with  the  somberness  of  the  past  wholly 
an  advantage?  3.  If  you  perceive  points  of  danger 
and  disadvantage  in  the  present  attitude,  indicate 
what  they  are.  4.  Do  you  consider  the  present  age 
as  on  the  whole  more  favorable  to  Christian  living 
than  the  past?  5.  If  so,  state  what  its  advantages 
are. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  GOSPEL  THAT  WORKS 

IN  a  quiet  Christian  home,  not  long  ago,  I  found 
this  bit  of  verse  from  a  well-known  woman  writer 
of  to-day: 

"  So  many  gods,  so  many  creeds, 
So  many  paths  that  wind  and  wind, 
When  just   the   art   of  being  kind 
Is  all  the  sad  world  needs." 

The  "  sad  world  "  was  no  idle  phrase  with  that 
family  just  then,  for  under  the  modestly  framed 
motto  was  an  open  coffin,  and  in  the  coffin  lay  the 
youngest  daughter  of  the  house,  one  of  the  fairest 
girls  of  thirteen  brief  summers  I  have  ever  seen. 
There  was  certainly  need  of  the  gospel  of  kindness 
in  that  house  that  day.  And  there  was  need  of 
more. 

There  is  need  of  the  gospel  of  kindness  in  every 
home  and  every  age.  The  "  art  of  being  kind  "  is 
not  so  common  that  we  can  afford  to  despise  any 
wise  emphasis  upon  it.  Nor  is  it  so  small  a  part 
of  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ  as  some  suppose. 
Love  may  be  the  larger  word,  but  there  is  some- 
20 


The  Gospel  that  Works  21 

thing  of  the  warmth  and  glow  of  the  open  fireside 
about  that  word  kindness,  and  it  does  one's  heart 
good  to  sit  before  it  and  take  in  the  brightness  and 
comfort  of  it. 

But  the  word  kindness  will  have  to  be  exceed- 
ingly enlarged  beyond  all  its  ordinary  meanings  if 
we  are  going  to  make  it  cover  all  the  height  and 
depth  and  length  and  breadth  of  religion.  This  is 
putting  a  strain  upon  the  word  which  our  differ- 
ences concerning  "  gods  "  and  "  creeds  "  will  hardly 
justify.  Nor  would  these  differences  disappear  if 
we  called  our  "  gods  "  and  "  creeds  "  by  some  other 
name,  whether  that  name  were  kindness  or  some 
more  pretentious  word. 

Our  age  will  not  be  satisfied  with  sectarianism 
for  religion,  but  neither  will  it  be  satisfied  with 
sentiment.  There  is  nothing  in  "  gods "  and 
"  creeds  "  except  as  our  idea  of  "  being's  source  and 
end"  is  an  inspiration  to  godly,  that  is  godlike, 
living.  In  the  last  analysis  the  value  of  a  man's 
"  god  "  is  the  "  good  "  which  follows.  So  also  the 
value  of  a  man's  creed,  that  is  of  his  belief,  is  its 
product  in  character.  What  he  lives  is  his  actual 
faith.  But  it  is  foolish  to  suppose  that  kindness 
cannot  be  counterfeited  quite  as  easily  as  any  other 
god  or  creed  when  kindness  is  substituted  for  these, 
and  there  is  no  reason  whatever  for  the  notion  that 
men  would  all  think  alike  as  to  kindness  if  that 
were  suddenly  made  the  universal  religious  formula. 
There  would  be  as  many  kinds  of  kindness  in  that 


22         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

case  as  there  are  kinds  of  "  gods  "  and  "  creeds  " 
now. 

The  popular  disparagement  of  "  gods "  and 
"  creeds "  which  finds  expression  everywhere  to- 
day is  chiefly  due  to  the  fact  that  our  contentions 
about  these  things  so  often  obscure  the  real  thing, 
and  that  is  that  the  end  of  all  religion  is  moral  and 
not  metaphysical,  spiritual  and  not  intellectual,  a 
present  salvation  from  "  the  sin  that  doth  so  easily 
beset  us  "  and  not  a  hypothetical  "  beatification " 
in  some  "  blessed  land "  beyond  the  grave.  It  is 
better  to  be  kind  here  and  now,  if  the  kindness  is 
real  and  not  merely  superficial,  than  it  is  to  hide 
harshness  and  selfishness  under  the  borrowed 
plumage  of  empty  talk  about  God,  even  though  our 
kindness  lack  something  of  conscious  inspiration 
through  faith  in  him  who  is  nevertheless  the  source 
of  all  the  goodness  and  kindness  that  is  in  the 
world.  It  is  better  to  be  negative  as  to  one's  be- 
liefs, to  confess  a  kind  of  a  vague  agnosticism  as  to 
the  beginning  and  end  of  things  if  one  can  still  be 
positive  on  the  side  of  righteousness  and  truth- 
fulness and  kindness  between  man  and  man  than  to 
have  "  the  plan  of  the  ages  "  at  one's  tongue's  end, 
and  at  the  same  time  be  narrow  and  intolerant  and 
void  of  any  effective  social  consciousness.  "  God  is 
not  mocked,"  and  as  between  the  man  who  worships 
a  shibboleth  in  the  name  of  God  and  the  man  who 
serves  righteousness  and  misses  the  definition  of 
the  divine,  there  is  no  reason  to  think  that  he  will 


The  Gospel  that  Works  23 

prefer  the  label  on  an  empty  package  to  the  goods 
themselves,  though  the  label  has  been  obscured. 
The  "  foundation  of  God "  which  "  nevertheless 
standeth  sure  "  is  very  significantly  defined  in  the 
ancient  Scripture  in  two  great  affirmations,  "  the 
Lord  knoweth  them  that  are  his,"  and  "  let  every 
one  that  nameth  the  name  of  the  Lord  depart  from 
unrighteousness."  Only  as  our  dogmatic  and 
creedal  packages  are  the  guarantee  of  genuineness 
and  uncontamination  will  they  count  for  anything 
with  God. 

All  this  is  granted  with  the  heartiest  welcome  to 
any  thoughtful  and  earnest  protest  against  mere 
creedalism  as  a  substitute  for  helpful,  faithful, 
kindly  living.  By  all  means  let  us  beware  of 
"  gods  "  and  "  creeds  "  which  tend  to  get  between 
us  and  godly  character.  The  demand  for  life  as 
against  mere  lip  service  is  good.  The  insistence 
upon  kindness  as  much  nearer  the  heart  of  religion 
than  contention  over  definitions  is  sensible  and 
sound.  "  Sound  doctrine  "  means  first  of  all  sound 
living,  and  when  it  means  less  the  clamor  for  it  is 
a  false  cry.  The  world's  need  to-day,  the  panacea 
for  present  problems,  is  not  the  success  of  this  or 
that  dogma  in  itself  considered,  nor  the  triumph  of 
any  mere  definition  of  the  gospel ;  the  world's  need 
is  the  gospel  itself,  and  nothing  less  than  this  will 
work  salvation  for  the  men  and  women  of  our  time. 
And  whatever  else  the  gospel  may  include  or  im- 
ply, the  gospel  itself  is  first  and  last  and  always  a 


24         The  Gospel  at  Work  In  Modern  Life 

life,  of  which  kindness  is  no  inconsiderable  part. 
Jesus  came  "  that  men  might  have  life,"  not  logic, 
and  that  "  they  might  have  it  more  abundantly," 
not  that  they  might  increase  their  creeds,  of  which 
the  world  had  already  a  plenty  even  then.  Certainly 
he  did  not  die  to  save  a  definition ;  he  died  as  he 
lived,  to  save  men.  Neither  is  there  any  definition 
by  which  men  are  always  and  everywhere  saved. 
Men  are  saved  as  they  live  in  him,  and  in  no  other 
way.  The  value  of  a  man's  creed  is  simply  as  a 
viaduct  through  which  the  water  of  life  finds  its 
way  to  his  inmost  life.  It  is  the  water  that  saves, 
not  the  waterway.  Yet,  how  shall  a  man  drink 
without  a  "  cup,"  even  the  "  blood  " ;  that  is,  the  life 
of  Christ?  Why  find  fault  that  some  waterways 
are  of  wood,  and  some  of  clay,  and  some  of  lead  or 
iron  or  stone,  unless  they  are  so  clogged  that  the 
water  cannot  flow  through  them  at  all,  or  unless  they 
dangerously  contaminate  the  water  itself?  Grant 
that  the  water  is  the  all  in  all,  and  that  here  and 
there  men  are  found  strong  enough  to  go  back  to 
its  hidden  sources  in  the  hills  and  drink  from  their 
own  hands.  Still  is  it  not  true  that  for  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  those  who  "  labor  and  are  heavy  laden  " 
the  water  must  be  carried  to  their  lips  in  cups  and 
vessels  which  other  men  have  made  and  filled,  and 
by  waterways  which  are  not  always  perfect  in  serv- 
ice? Even  the  poorest  of  this  service  is  generally 
better  than  no  service  at  all.  And,  unfortunately, 
if  I  may  carry  the  figure  a  little  farther,  the  tend- 


The  Gospel  that  Works  25 

ency  in  modern  life  is  to  favor  less  of  private  mon- 
opoly in  these  waterways  which  serve  the  multitude, 
and  to  make  the  service  both  cheaper  and  better ;  in 
a  word,  to  give  every  man  more  of  immediate  con- 
trol over  his  own  supplies. 

The  fact  is  that  what  we  need  is  not  fewer 
"  gods "  and  "  creeds."  What  we  need  is  more. 
We  need  that  every  man  shall  have  his  own  thought 
about  God,  and  that  every  man  shall  have  his  own 
individual  faith  toward  the  divine.  There  would  be 
more  of  goodness  and  kindness  if  there  were  more 
thoughtfulness  about  religious  things.  The  gospel 
will  work  best  as  it  works  most  individually,  as 
every  man  insists  upon  it  for  himself  that  he  has  a 
pure  and  a  plenteous  supply.  We  may  not  all  pre- 
fer the  same  kind  of  a  cup,  and  we  may  not  all  be 
supplied  through  the  same  particular  pipe  next  to 
our  own  door.  But  we  are  all  getting  to  the  point 
where  we  feel  the  common  need  of  getting  the 
water  as  nearly  as  possible  as  it  falls  out  of  the  same 
generous  skies  or  springs  in  purity  from  the  depths 
of  the  ground.  And  for  our  religion  we  are  all 
getting  back  more  and  more  to  the  mountain 
heights  of  the  Scriptures  and  the  skies  under  which 
we  stand  face  to  face  with  God. 

Let  the  young  Christian  beware  both  of  overmuch 
dependence  upon  creeds  and  of  overmuch  dispar- 
agement of  creeds.  He  can  neither  get  along  with 
them  nor  without  them  of  themselves.  Their  value 
for  him  is  their  mediation  of  life  to  him.  If  the 


26         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

divine  life  flows  free  and  strong  through  them, 
they  are  of  value  to  him,  otherwise  they  are  worse 
than  vain.  But  let  him  not  suppose  that  he  can  sub- 
stitute for  them  some  vague  sentiment  which  has 
no  sense  of  God  and  no  imperative  of  divine  origin 
and  destiny  within  it.  This  will  prove  but  a  mir- 
age in  the  desert.  No  gospel  will  work  very  long 
or  very  far  in  our  own  age  or  any  other  which  is 
not  first  of  all  a  gospel  of  God.  "  Well,  what  do 
you  believe  in  ? "  I  asked  an  irate  infidel,  who 
gloried  in  the  name,  and  who  was  raging  against 
the  idea  of  God.  And  he  thundered  at  me  with  tre- 
mendous inconsistency,  "  What  do  I  believe  in  ?  I 
believe  in  LOVE  ! "  Yet,  long  centuries  ago,  one 
said  to  have  been  that  disciple  who  leaned  on  Jesus' 
bosom,  and  who  learned  from  the  Master  himself  the 
immortal  and  incomparable  definition,  gave  this  as 
the  synonym  of  God,  "  God  is  LOVE/'  So  that  either 
the  infidel  was  himself  a  hypocrite,  or  else  he  was  not 
an  infidel,  since  his  faith  was  in  God.  A  man  may 
look  up,  and  in  fellowship  with  Jesus  say,  "  Abba," 
that  is,  "  Father,"  or  he  may  talk  learnedly  of  his 
confidence  in  "  the  integrity  of  the  cosmic  proc- 
ess," but  if  he  thinks  truly  at  all,  he  will  hardly 
get  away  from  the  idea  of  God.  No  other  gospel 
works  life  in  men.  It  is  no  accident  that  the 
record  is  made  concerning  Moses,  whose  kindness 
to  Israel  was  no  mere  personal  sentiment,  but  an 
all-consuming  social  passion,  "  He  endured  as  see- 
ing him  who  is  invisible."  No  kindness  bigger  than 


The  Gospel  that  Works  27 

a  bit  of  simple  good  nature  or  passing  sentiment 
will  long  "  endure  "  without  spiritual  vision.  The 
gospel  that  works  is  the  gospel  of  God. 

And  it  is  the  gospel  of  God  in  a  person,  in  "  the 
man  Christ  Jesus."  "  You  think  that  you  do  not  be- 
lieve in  the  divinity  of  Jesus  Christ,"  I  said  in  sub- 
stance to  a  friend  of  ultra-Unitarian  views,  but  of 
very  beautiful  and  Christlike  life.  "  Are  you  sure 
of  it?  Is  not  the  God  and  Father  in  whom  you 
believe  really  Jesus  Christ,  whom  you  have  given 
another  name?  Are  not  all  your  thoughts  of  the 
divine  actually  in  terms  of  Jesus  Christ?  Neither 
you  nor  any  one  else  can  be  saved  from  false  think- 
ing and  false  living,  except  as  you  do  really  think 
and  live  in  him,  whether  you  recognize  him  as  the 
source  of  your  living  and  thinking  or  not."  He 
could  not  deny  the  affirmation,  though  he  was  slow 
to  allow  what  it  implied  to  me. 

The  gospel  that  works  is  always  and  everywhere 
the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ.  It  always  was.  Even 
before  Jesus  was  revealed?  Certainly  so.  This  is 
the  meaning  of  that  word,  "  Before  Abraham  was  I 
am";  and  that  other  word  said  to  those  who  felt 
themselves  at  a  disadvantage  because  the  generation 
of  those  who  had  seen  and  known  the  Lord  in  the 
flesh  was  rapidly  failing  from  among  men,  "  Jesus 
Christ  the  same  yesterday,  and  to-day,  and  for- 
ever." The  only  gospel  that  ever  saved  anybody 
was  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ.  "  That  was  the 
true  light  which  lighteth  every  man  that  cometh 


28         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

into  the  world."  Something  of  the  light  which 
shone  in  all  perfectness  in  him  has  filtered  through 
to  all  men,  and  they  have  been  saved  from  present 
sinning  and  for  the  future  mercy  of  God  just  in 
the  measure  that  they  have  believed  and  lived  the 
doctrine  which  he  made  incarnate,  the  word  which 
he  "  made  flesh."  There  is  truth  in  the  old  doc- 
trine of  "  total  depravity  "  to  this  extent  at  least 
that  every  man  is  wholly  bad  except  as  he  catches 
here  and  there  something  of  the  spirit  of  Jesus  and 
is  touched  with  something  of  his  life.  Men  are  only 
saved  even  here  and  now  as  they  are  saved  in  him, 
by  getting  for  the  moment  or  for  this  or  that  phase 
of  character  into  oneness  with  him. 

It  is  true  enough  that  religion  is  not  fundamen- 
tally and  finally  a  matter  of  "  gods  "  and  "  creeds." 
Neither  is  it  a  matter  of  "  the  art  of  being  kind  " 
alone.  It  is  a  matter  of  getting  into  touch  with 
God  through  essential  union  with  Jesus  Christ  in 
the  life  which  he  lived  among  men.  A  man's  defi- 
nition of  God  may  be  faulty  and  his  creed  at  many 
points  quite  incredible  to  any  intelligent  mind,  and 
yet  he  may  have  much  of  the  spirit  of  Christ,  and  the 
gospel  of  Christ  may  be  working  in  him  mightily 
for  the  salvation  of  the  world.  But  whatever  of 
good  there  is  in  him,  and  whatever  of  good  he  is 
actually  doing  in  the  world,  is  of  Christ;  not  of 
his  beliefs  about  Christ,  which  may  be  very  much 
awry,  but  of  his  substantial  agreement  with  Christ 
in  spirit  and  in  word  and  deed.  There  is  a  vast 


The  Gospel  that  Works  29 

amount  of  believing  about  Jesus,  and  some  of  it 
quite  correct  believing,  which  does  not  work. 
Whatever  does  work  and  stand  the  test  of  time, 
needs  only  to  be  truly  known  to  be  proven  as  be- 
longing to  the  revelation  of  Christ.  Nothing  will 
work  that  is  not  fundamentally  of  him.  Nothing 
that  is  actually  of  him  will  ultimately  fail  to  work. 
What  the  age  needs  is  Christ.  Not  the  name  only, 
nor  this  or  that  creed  about  him.  None  of  our 
creeds  about  him  have  any  importance  worth  while 
except  as  they  mediate  his  life  to  us  and  to  the 
world.  When  we  make  them  final  we  make  them 
mischievous,  sometimes  more  mischievous  than  no 
creed  at  all.  Creeds  only  work  good  as  they  work 
Christ  into  human  lives.  He  who  has  Christ  will 
need  no  other  master  to  teach  him  kindness.  But 
Christ  will  teach  him  vastly  more.  He  will  teach 
him  love  in  all  its  largeness,  and  with  this  love,  faith 
toward  God  and  toward  man,  without  which  love 
is  as  sad  as  Buddhism;  and  with  this  faith,  hope, 
both  for  the  future  of  this  present  world  and  for 
his  own  and  humanity's  hereafter.  Nothing  that 
the  world  needs  is  out  of  Christ,  and  nothing  of 
good  that  the  world  has.  If  there  is  any  superior 
efficiency  in  the  gospel  of  our  day,  and  I  think  there 
is,  it  is  the  superior  efficiency  of  a  gospel  which  is 
more  perfectly  than  the  faith  of  yesterday  the  gos- 
pel which  Jesus  lived  and  taught.  If  there  is  any 
deficiency,  and  there  is  much  beyond  question,  it 
is  deficiency  in  understanding  or  applying  the  truth 


3O         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

as  it  is  in  him.  Whether  for  yourself  or  for  the 
world,  if  you  would  find  the  gospel  that  works  you 
must  find  him. 

*** 
fail 


I.  In  what  sense  can  we  properly  speak  of 
"  gods  "  to-day?  2.  What  is  the  end  and  object  of 
religion  as  here  set  forth?  3.  What  value  have 
creeds?  4.  What  is  believing  in  God?  5.  What  do 
you  understand  by  thinking  of  God  "  in  terms  of 
Jesus  Christ  "?  6.  Can  a  man  believe  in  Christ  and 
not  believe  properly  about  him?  7.  What  is  the 
gospel  that  works  ? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

I.  What  is  kindness?  2.  What  are  the  indica- 
tions in  modern  life  that  men  are  moving  toward 
democracy  in  religion  and  away  from  monopoly? 
3.  What  varieties  of  practical  polytheism  have  we 
still  with  us  to-day?  4.  In  what  sense  could  men 
be  actually  saved  through  Christ  before  Christ 
came?  5.  In  what  sense  is  Christ  the  working  gospel 
of  all  ages  ?  6.  What  do  you  understand  by  finding 
Christ  for  yourself? 


CHAPTER  III 

DEVELOPMENT,    A   CHRISTIANAS   FIRST   DUTY 

IT  is  said  of  the  great  Russian  thinker  and  writer, 
Count  Lyoff  Tolstoy,  now  past  eighty  years  of  age, 
that  he  recently  confessed  a  consciousness  of  three 
periods  in  his  life.  During  the  first  period,  which 
is  far  away  from  him  now  in  point  of  time  and 
much  farther  in  any  interest  or  regard  he  has 
toward  it,  he  lived  for  himself  and  for  the  pleas- 
ures of  the  flesh.  The  second  period,  which  was  the 
period  of  his  conversion  and  his  first  religious 
writings,  and  also  largely  of  his  philanthropic  ef- 
forts, he  was  chiefly  anxious  to  do  good,  and  to  dis- 
seminate his  ideas  for  the  benefit  of  mankind.  Dur- 
ing the  third  period  even  his  anxiety  to  do  good 
has  largely  ceased,  and  his  interest  is  in  being  good ; 
or  as  he  would  put  it,  he  is  content  to  seek  for  him- 
self fellowship  with  God  and  that  perfection  of 
character  which  he  realizes  now  as  the  highest  end 
and  aim  of  life. 

Thomas  Carlyle,  the  great  Scotch  philosopher, 
who  in  his  own  way  was  perhaps  as  profoundly  re- 
ligious as  Tolstoy  himself,  made  a  somewhat  similar 
confession  in  his  old  age.  Speaking  of  Darwin  and 
Darwinism,  he  once  said :  "  The  older  I  grow,  and 


32  The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

now  I  stand  upon  the  brink  of  eternity,  the  more 
there  comes  back  to  me  the  words  which  I  learned 
from  the  old  church  catechism  when  a  child :  '  What 
is  the  chief  aim  and  end  of  man  ? '  and  the  answer : 
'  To  glorify  God,  and  enjoy  him  forever.'  No 
gospel  of  dirt,  teaching  that  men  are  descended 
from  frogs  through  monkeys,  can  ever  set  that 
aside." 

Carlyle's  fling  at  evolution,  which  was  a  con- 
siderably different  matter  then  from  what  it  is 
now,  we  can  afford  to  pass  by,  for  it  does  not  con- 
cern us  'here.  But  the  testimony  of  these  two 
mighty  minds  to  the  primary  importance  of 
spiritual  growth  and  culture  as  the  end  of  supreme 
significance  in  itself  is  testimony  not  to  be  lightly 
ignored.  Whatever  allowance  we  may  make  for 
the  lessening  interest  of  men  in  what  are  called 
practical  affairs  as  earth  recedes  and  the  other 
world  draws  nearer,  these  men  cannot  be  accused 
of  ever  having  lost  their  sense  of  fellowship  with 
humanity  or  their  intense  and  self-sacrificing  spirit 
toward  the  betterment  of  this  present  world.  It 
might  be  said  of  them  in  a  sense,  as  it  was  said  of 
Jesus,  "  Having  loved  his  own,  he  loved  them  unto 
the  end."  Carlyle,  and  Tolstoy  at  eighty  belong  to 
the  world,  and  have  no  less  hearty  interest  in  it 
than  fifty  years  before.  But  they  understand  better 
what  life's  first  great  concern  really  is. 

The  best  gift  that  any  man  can  give  to  the  world 
is  himself.  And  a  man  never  gives  himself  to  the 


Development,  a  Christian's  First  Duty        33 

world  until  he  has  first  of  all  given  himself  to  God. 
This  is  no  formal  religious  phrase;  it  is  supreme 
spiritual  fact.  That  old  story  in  Genesis  is  capable 
of  many  a  concealed  meaning.  It  is  not  good  for 
man  "  to  be  "  alone.  Doing  is  as  necessary  to  be- 
ing as  the  woman  is  to  the  man.  "  And  what  God 
hath  joined  together  let  not  man  put  asunder." 
But  being  is  first.  And  not  until  being  is  formed 
at  the  hand  of  God,  and  gets  its  life  from  the  very 
breath  of  God,  can  doing  proceed  by  the  same  di- 
vine will  out  of  its  side.  And  then  they  two  are 
indeed  one  flesh. 

Christian  living  to-day  cannot  be  separated  from 
the  life  of  to-day.  If  we  are  to  follow  Jesus' 
method  of  mingling  with  men,  and  interpenetrating 
the  human  with  the  divine,  we  must  be  men  and 
women  of  our  time,  in  touch  with  its  expanding 
knowledge,  participating  in  its  enlarging  material  de- 
velopment, responsive  to  its  humor  and  happiness, 
and  co-operating  in  its  co-operative  spirit.  We  must 
be  able  to  distinguish  the  gospel  from  the  incidents 
and  accidents  of  present-day  religious  expression  in 
gospel  lands,  and  must  know  how  to  apply  the  sub- 
stance of  hope  and  faith  and  love  so  that  the  very 
essence  of  the  Christian  revelation  shall  be  applied  to 
the  everyday  aspects  of  life  as  it  actually  is  in  the 
world  around  us  to-day.  But  to  understand  our 
times  is  even  less  important  than  to  understand  our- 
selves, and  the  good  we  give  will  be  limited  always 
and  everywhere  by  the  good  we  get. 
c 


34         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

Moral  philosophers  have  discussed  a  great  deal 
the  question,  What  is  the  smmmum  bonum,  "  the 
greatest  good  "  ?  Much  may  be  said  for  happiness  as 
the  end  toward  which  all  things  move.  But  per- 
fection of  character,  which  includes  happiness  as  a 
consequent,  is  on  the  whole  the  more  satisfactory 
definition  of  life's  aim  and  end.  "  Be  ye  therefore 
perfect,"  said  Jesus,  "  even  as  your  Father  in  heaven 
is  perfect."  He  did  not  say,  "  Be  ye  therefore 
happy,"  though  he  indicated  in  his  beatitudes  that 
blessedness,  or  happiness,  is  the  resultant  of  right 
character.  The  words  that  we  run  off  so  often  in 
glib  fashion,  "  Be  good  and  you'll  be  happy,"  have 
a  large  measure  of  substantial  sense  in  them. 
Yet  the  more  modern  version  of  the  saying,  half 
facetiously  said,  "  Be  good  and  you'll  be  lone- 
some," voices  a  great  deal  of  very  serious  experi- 
ence. One  of  our  common  Christian  hymns  has 
for  its  chorus  in  part,  "  And  now  I  am  happy  all 
the  day."  But  the  words  are  not  true  of  most  of 
us,  and  they  are  not  true  of  the  best  of  us  in  the 
light  fashion  in  which  we  run  them  off  our  tongues. 
Jesus  was  "  a  man  of  sorrows,  and  acquainted  with 
grief,"  notwithstanding  the  "  joy  "  and  "  peace  " 
which  were  his  priceless  bequest  to  the  world.  And 
every  man  who  follows  him  will  know  something 
of  "the  fellowship  of  his  suffering"  before  he 
tastes  of  "  the  power  of  his  resurrection."  Not 
mirth,  but  manhood;  not  pleasure,  but  personality; 
not  happiness,  but  wholeness  the  Christian  must 


Development,  a  Christian  s  First  Duty        35 

make    the    greatest    good    of    his    effort    and    his 
thought. 

There  is  danger  in  any  lower  ideal.  Happiness 
so  easily  becomes  mere  luxuriousness,  or  some  form 
of  mischievous  self-indulgence.  Hedonism,  the 
philosophy  of  pleasure,  may,  indeed,  become  highly 
moral  if  carefully  reasoned  out  and  held  under  the 
dominion  of  serious  thought;  but  the  whole  tend- 
ency of  it  is  to  degenerate  easily  into  this  or  that 
form  of  sensuous  delight.  Even  a  great  deal  of 
what  passes  for  Christian  happiness  is  very  far  re- 
moved from  that  blessedness  which  Jesus  set  forth 
as  the  fruit  of  the  humble,  gentle,  pure,  and  peace- 
able mind.  Much  of  it  is  the  contagious  enthusiasm 
of  an  emotional  crowd,  wherein  half  the  charm  and 
a  large  part  of  the  danger  of  our  great  meetings 
will  be  found.  Much  of  it  is  the  half-unconscious 
gratification  of  personal  ambitions,  and  the  deep 
desire  for  prominence  which  more  or  less  actuates 
us  all.  Sometimes  it  is  a  kind  of  self-induced  hyp- 
notic state  wherein  we  abide  in  dangerous  self- 
complacency  because  we  have  lost  the  sense  of  our 
relations  to  the  actual  life  around  us  for  a  time. 
A  great  deal  of  so-called  "  holiness  "  is  of  this  last- 
named  type,  and  does  not  really  consist  in  whole- 
someness  of  character  so  much  as  it  does  in  a  de- 
fective consciousness  of  self  and  the  living  world 
about  us.  There  are  as  many  forms  of  deceitful 
happiness  as  there  are  kinds  of  intoxicating  drink, 
and  there  is  more  pertinence  than  appears  to  many 


36         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

of  us  in  the  old-fashioned  warning  of  the  Scrip- 
tures, "And  be  not  drunk  with  wine  wherein  is 
excess ;  but  be  filled  with  the  Spirit."  All  forms  of 
happiness  tend  to  excess,  even  what  is  sometimes 
called  spiritual  happiness.  The  spirit  of  wholeness, 
of  perfectness,  is  our  only  safe  guide. 

There  is  need  of  caution,  even  with  reference  to 
perfection  as  an  ideal,  lest  we  think  of  self-develop- 
ment too  much  from  the  standpoint  of  self  alone, 
and  with  regard  to  an  ideal  which  is  not  the  ideal 
of  the  gospel.  All  that  has  been  said  about  the 
modern  Christian's  problems,  and  all  that  has  been 
said  concerning  the  substance  of  the  gospel  that 
works,  needs  to  be  kept  in  mind  if  we  are  to  seek 
such  development  as  will  make  us  both  Christian 
and  Christian  in  relation  to  the  age  in  which  we 
live. 

A  witty  young  minister,  who  was  attending  a 
banquet  of  Christian  workers,  and  had  his  newly 
wedded  bride  with  him,  got  off  this  clever  witticism 
at  her  expense :  "  Some  women,"  he  said,  "  marry 
shoemakers  that  they  may  be  shod  for  nothing; 
some  women  marry  doctors  that  they  may  be  doc- 
tored for  nothing."  Then,  looking  fondly  and 
roguishly  at  his  wife,  he  added  slowly,  "  And  some 
women  marry  ministers — that  they  may  be  good 
for  nothing." 

Neither  women  nor  men  are  good  unless  they  are 
good  for  something.  A  great  deal  of  perfectionism 
is  altogether  in  the  air;  it  amounts  to  nothing  in 


Development,  a  Christian's  First  Duty        37 

practical  Christian  living.  It  is  not  really  self- 
development  so  much  as  it  is  self-excitation  and 
self-illusionment.  The  man  does  not  actually  know 
any  more  than  he  knew  before.  Most  perfectionists 
are  wholly  out  of  sympathy  and  understanding  of 
modern  knowledge.  The  man  is  not  a  better  work- 
man, nor  a  better  master.  The  Eighth  Psalm  is  a 
wonderful  picture  of  man  as  the  viceroy  of  God 
upon  earth,  entering  into  his  lordship  over  nature 
as  he  enters  more  and  more  into  his  sonship  with 
God.  But  a  great  deal  of  what  is  mistaken  for 
Christian  culture  is  wholly  apart  from  man's 
sovereignty  over  the  world  around  him;  it  has 
nothing  to  do  with  the  world's  work.  Especially  is 
a  great  deal  of  what  is  reckoned  effort  toward 
Christian  perfection  morbid  and  melancholy  and 
wholly  out  of  touch  with  wholesome  laughter  and 
life's  good  cheer.  This  is  not  perfection,  for  there 
can  be  no  perfection  of  any  part  which  does  not 
adapt  it  for  its  place  in  the  whole.  No  piece  of  a 
watch  is  perfect  unless  it  will  work  with  the  rest. 
Perfection  means  participation,  not  abstraction.  To 
develop  one  feature  of  a  man's  face  out  of  all  har- 
monious relation  to  his  other  features  is  to  make  a 
caricature  of  the  man.  And  a  good  deal  of  "  re- 
ligiousness "  is  a  caricature  of  righteousness,  not 
the  less  so  that  it  is  sincere  and  serious  enough. 

Herein  is  the  mischief  of  mysticism  of  every  type. 
It  lacks  where  Jesus  was  complete — in  his  identifica- 
tion of  himself  with  life.  "  Jesus  grew  in  wisdom 


38         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

and  in  stature,  and  in  favor  with  God  and  man." 
But  he  grew  within  his  environment,  and  he  grew 
into  all  the  life  of  his  time.  He  did  not  grow  apart 
from  men,  but  he  grew  among  men.  Doubtless  he 
studied  in  such  schools  as  Nazareth  had.  There  is 
an  easily  believable  tradition  that  he  worked  at  the 
carpenter's  bench  with  his  father.  He  wore  no 
such  exceptional  clothes  as  John  the  Baptist  wore, 
nor  did  he  live  upon  a  peculiar  diet,  or  assume  in 
anywise  peculiar  ways.  This  is  Christian  develop- 
ment, in  harmonious  adjustment  with  actual  every- 
day life.  It  is  not  being  good,  either  "  for  noth- 
ing," or  in  some  far-off  abstract,  emotional  way. 
It  is  emphatically  "  being  good  for  something."  Yet 
it  is  more  than  mere  activity.  Jesus  was  no  insti- 
tutionalist.  He  was  as  far  from  identifying  char- 
acter with  outward  circumstance  and  conditions  as 
he  was  from  divorcing  the  two.  Development  with 
him  was  never  separate  from  life,  but  neither  was 
it  identical  with  any  outward  show.  He  was  both 
the  practical  man  of  affairs  and  the  idealist,  both  of 
his  own  century  emphatically,  and  of  eternity.  His 
perfection  was  both  timely  and  timeless. 

One  gets  this  development  only  by  holding  fast  to 
these  two  things :  the  "  time-spirit  "  of  his  own  age, 
and  the  timelessness  of  the  essential  gospel.  To 
know  the  age  in  which  we  live,  to  feel  its  problems 
and  enter  sympathetically  into  their  solution,  to 
have  what  may  be  called  a  contemporary  conscious- 
ness; and  then  to  know  the  heart  of  the  gospel,  to 


Development,  a  Christian's  First  Duty        39 

get  beneath  its  own  time-forms  to  its  everlasting 
and  never-changing  spirit,  and  to  bring  these  two 
together  in  one's  self  so  that  the  seed  of  the  time- 
less truth  shall  grow  in  the  newly  turned  soil  of 
the  present  and  shall  have  every  advantage  of  the 
latest  instruments  and  methods  of  cultivation,  this 
is  what  Christian  development  means  when  rightly 
understood. 

"  After  that  he  had  served  his  own  generation  ac- 
cording to  the  will  of  God  he  fell  on  sleep,"  is  the 
great  epitaph  of  Israel's  great  shepherd-king.  And 
that  is  still  the  Christian  ideal,  to  live  "  according 
to  the  will  of  God  "  and  in  that  will  to  serve  one's 
"  own  generation."  Only  the  gospel  of  Christ  has 
given  us  a  clearer  manifestation  of  God,  and  of 
what  it  is  to  live  "  according  to  his  will."  And  it 
has  given  us  also  a  "  generation  "  of  our  own  whose 
conditions  are  very  different  from  those  which  con- 
fronted the  son  of  Jesse  and  the  successor  of  Saul. 
But  David  was  more  Christian  than  many  Chris- 
tians are,  because  he  combined  communion  with  the 
divine  and  the  companionship  of  men  in  all  that 
made  for  the  larger  life  of  his  times  in  a  measure 
altogether  too  uncommon  in  the  world  yet. 

This  is  the  Christian's  first  business,  perfection. 
Not  abstraction  from  the  wickedness  of  the  world, 
nor  activity  in  the  religiousness  of  the  world,  but 
the  development  of  himself  in  faith,  and  hope,  and 
love.  In  this  development  he  will  find  retirement 
sometimes  necessary  to  enlargement  of  life.  In  this 


4O         The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

development  he  will  find  religious  activity  often 
helpful  to  him.  But  he  will  choose  them  not  as 
ends  in  themselves,  but  as  means  to  the  one  great 
end,  the  realization  of  the  divine  life  in  himself. 
And  he  will  study  to  perfect  himself  not  in  some 
peculiar  type  of  ecstatic  experience,  but  in  the  serv- 
ice of  men  through  being  himself  among  men,  and 
in  relation  to  like  experiences  with  their  own  the 
embodiment  of  the  truth  which  alone  can  make  men 
free. 

To  honor  God,  to  benefit  mankind, 
To  serve  with  lowly  gifts  the  lowly  needs 
Of  the  poor  race  for  which  the  God- 
man  died, 

And  do  it  all  for  love !    Oh,  this  is  great, 
And  he  who  does  this  will  achieve  a  name 
Not  only  great,  but  good. 

— /.  G.  Holland. 

*** 

Quiz 

I.  What  is  the  chief  aim  and  end  of  man  as  sug- 
gested by  Tolstoy  and  Carlyle,  and  other  like  philos- 
ophers? 2.  What  do  you  understand  by  perfection, 
and  what  is  the  chief  defect  of  most  so-called  "  per- 
fectionism"? 3.  What  is  "  Hedonism  "?  4.  Can  a 
Christian  reasonably  expect  to  be  always  happy?  5. 
If  not,  why  not?  6.  What  is  the  mischief  of  mys- 
ticism? 7,  What  do  you  understand  by  the  "  time- 


Development,  a  Christian's  First  Duty        41 

spirit "    and    the    "  timelessness    of    the    essential 
gospel"  as  applied  to  practical  Christian  living? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  Are  the  present  aspects  of  the  doctrine  of  evo- 
lution more  or  less  favorable  to  the  religious  life 
than  the  earlier  definitions  of  it?  2.  Do  you  dis- 
cover any  likeness  between  the  monastic  attitude 
toward  the  Christian  life  and  modern  "  holiness  "  ? 
3.  What  may  be  said  for  the  great  mystics  and  for 
mysticism  in  general?  4.  Is  religious  activity  ever 
a  menace  to  the  religious  life? 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   GOSPEL   AND   WORSHIP 

ON  the  face  of  the  returns,  the  enlargement  of 
modern  life  has  not  made  for  worship.  There  is  an 
old  and  often  quoted  sentiment,  given  on  the  au- 
thority of  more  than  one  great  name,  that  "  igno- 
rance is  the  mother  of  devotion."  However  this 
may  be,  the  remarkable  increase  of  knowledge  in  our 
times,  and  the  apparent  decline  of  public  worship, 
seem  sometimes  to  justify  the  proverb.  There  are  a 
great  many  people  who  unfortunately  have  been 
educated  away  from  the  churches,  and  many  of  the 
keenest  minds  of  the  day  confess  both  in  speech 
and  conduct  their  indifference  to  all  the  forms  of 
religious  devotion. 

The  growth  of  wealth  has  also  made  against 
worship.  Mammonism  has  never  been  on  the  side 
of  spiritual  sensibility,  and  spiritual  sensibility  is  at 
the  root  of  worship.  Here  and  there  a  millionaire 
may  be  sincerely  religious,  and  a  great  many  people 
of  moderate  fortune,  especially  if  that  fortune  is 
inherited,  are  undoubtedly  so.  But  the  multitude  of 
those  who  are  possessed  with  the  money  mania  are 
not  genuinely  interested  in  prayer  and  praise  and 
the  quest  after  the  values  that  are  unseen.  All 
42 


The  Gospel  and  Worship  43 

who  give  themselves  passionately  to  the  pursuit  of 
wealth  are  thereby  drawn  away  from  following  after 
Christ,  according  to  the  discipleship  which  he  him- 
self required  when  he  walked  among  men.  The  in- 
creasing clamor  of  the  market-place  does  not  make 
for  growth  in  the  spirit  of  meditation,  and  the  larger 
material  prizes  which  our  age  offers  to  the  man  who 
succeeds  after  the  world's  methods  and  the  world's 
measures  do  not  serve  as  an  inducement  to  worship 
God  alone. 

The  intenser  pleasure  life  of  our  period  is  also 
unfavorable  to  worship.  The  bicycle,  the  auto- 
mobile, the  Sunday  excursion,  the  Sunday  theater 
and  nickelodeon,  and  all  the  multiplied  devices  for 
attracting  the  people  away  from  Sunday  rest  and 
the  house  of  God  on  the  one  day  in  seven  when 
they  are  otherwise  unemployed,  have  tremendously 
increased  the  temptation  to  forget  God  and  live  in 
the  sensations  of  the  present  hour.  This  pleasure 
life  of  the  many  in  its  more  unhealthful  phases  is 
stimulated  by  the  money  mania  of  those  who  cater 
to  them.  The  street  railway  manager  may  himself 
be  the  devout  and  orthodox  Sunday-school  teacher 
in  an  evangelical  Sunday-school,  yet  the  railway  of 
which  he  has  charge  may  be  one  of  the  most  mis- 
chievous promoters  of  Sabbath  desecration  and  all- 
around  Sunday  dissipation  which  the  city  or  State 
can  show.  The  big  breweries  have  not  more  un- 
conscionably contributed  to  the  extension  of  the  re- 
tail liquor  shop  and  the  stimulation  by  every  evil 


44        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

device  of  the  demoralizing  appetite  for  strong  drink 
to  the  end  that  they  might  increase  their  own  divi- 
dends at  whatever  cost  to  the  public  welfare  than 
have  the  venders  of  transportation  and  the  pro- 
moters of  amusements  forced  forth  their  dividends 
with  unrighteous  disregard  for  those  great  interests 
of  society  which  are  bound  up  in  a  right  use  of  the 
weekly  rest  day,  and  in  the  preservation  of  the 
spirit  of  worship. 

The  forces  that  work  against  worship  as  to  the 
observance  of  its  outward  forms,  at  least,  are  not 
wholly  evil  in  themselves.  Quite  aside  from  that 
type  of  knowledge  which  leads  men  away  from  the 
church  and  the  religious  life,  and  far  removed  from 
the  materialistic  mammonism  and  thoughtless  pleas- 
ure-seeking which  work  the  same  result  in  even 
more  destructive  ways,  there  are  other  forces  at 
work  which  are  good  in  themselves,  and  in  the  main, 
wholesome  in  their  influence  which  are,  nevertheless, 
not  on  the  side  of  crowded  churches,  the  swelling 
anthem,  and  the  voice  of  public  prayer. 

The  increase  of  real  religion  sometimes  makes 
for  an  apparent  decline  of  worship.  Men  who  think 
of  churchgoing  as  the  sum  and  substance  of 
religious  obligation,  are  frequently  more  attentive  to 
it  than  are  those  who  appreciate  more  truly  what 
religion  is.  The  comparison  often  lightly  made  be- 
tween Roman  Catholics  and  Protestants  in  the 
matter  of  faithful  and  self-sacrificing  attendance 
upon  public  worship,  is  generally  faulty  at  this  point. 


The  Gospel  and  Worship  45 

The  average  Roman  Catholic  thinks  of  religion 
much  more  in  terms  of  ritual  and  formal  devotion 
than  does  the  average  Protestant.  Worship  with 
the  one  is  the  first  fact  in  religion ;  with  the  other  the 
first  fact  is  spiritual  attitude.  The  church  is  religion 
to  the  one;  it  is  only  an  expression  of  religion 
to  the  other.  Therefore,  as  men  grow  in  appreci- 
ation of  what  the  gospel  is  in  fact,  they  are,  super- 
ficially, at  least,  more  indifferent  to  this  or  that 
particular  form.  The  woman  with  whom  Jesus 
talked  at  the  well  of  Samaria  was  apparently  more 
concerned  than  was  Jesus  himself  in  regard  to  the 
proprieties  of  public  worship.  "  Our  fathers  wor- 
shipped in  this  mountain,  and  ye  say  that  in  Jeru- 
salem is  the  place  where  men  ought  to  worship,"  is 
her  plaint.  Jesus  sets  all  the  externals  of  religion 
aside  for  the  moment  that  he  may  emphasize  the 
spiritual  character  of  any  real  approach  to  God.  If 
the  church  is  conceived  of  as  some  divinely  ap- 
pointed place  of  worship,  and  worship  itself  as  a 
certain  set  manner  of  approach  to  God,  then  did 
Jesus  make  less  of  worship  than  the  Samaritan  wo- 
man. But  he  made  a  great  deal  more  of  the  inner 
life  of  worship  than  she  had  ever  known. 

The  gospel  that  works  does  not  always  work  most 
for  a  life  of  devotional  form.  Perfection  of  char- 
acter as  an  ideal  tends  to  emphasize  the  doing  of 
what  Jesus  said,  and  identity  of  spirit  with  his 
spirit,  rather  than  any  ritualistic  recitation  of 
"Lord!  Lord!"  There  is  a  great  deal  of  cant 


46        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

and  insincerity  on  the  part  of  many  who  excuse 
their  neglect  of  the  church  and  public  worship  for 
a  pretended  fellowship  with  God  in  nature,  though 
with  some,  "the  groves  are  God's  first  temples"  still. 

Likewise,  many  gloss  over  their  mammonism  with 
dishonest  deceit  as  to  the  pressure  of  business  life 
upon  them,  and  their  need  of  rest  on  the  Lord's  Day, 
and  many  others  justify  a  false  "  recreation  "  with 
a  mere  subterfuge  of  words.  But  when  all  this  is 
said,  it  is  still  true  that  the  better  side  of  modern 
religious  life,  the  growing  appreciation  of  the  sim- 
plicity of  the  gospel,  and  the  increasing  demand  for 
a  Christian  life  as  against  mere  lip  service,  play  an 
important  part  to-day  in  determining  the  definition 
of  worship  which  everywhere  more  and  more  pre- 
vails. And  this  new  definition  of  worship,  which  is 
more  Christian  at  heart,  is  part  of  the  reason  why 
our  age  seems  less  worshipful  than  the  ages  which 
have  gone  before. 

Jesus  made  few  references  to  public  worship,  and 
when  he  did  refer  to  worship,  his  references  were 
not  always  of  a  complimentary  kind.  He  spoke  de- 
preciatingly of  the  long  prayers  of  the  Pharisees, 
and  all  the  ostentation  of  their  pretended  service  of 
God.  He  warned  men  against  sacrifice  itself  when 
the  worshiper  was  not  at  peace  with  his  fellows, 
and  put  reconciliation  with  man  before  the  offering 
of  any  kind  of  homage  to  God.  Even  the  devotion 
of  almsgiving  was  offensive  to  him  if  it  lacked  the 
spirit  of  self-effacing  love.  He  laid  no  requirement 


The  Gospel  and  Worship  47 

upon  his  disciples  of  regular  attendance  upon  public 
worship,  nor  did  he  prescribe  any  forms  or  seasons 
for  their  approach  to  the  Father.  The  one  prayer 
that  he  gave  was  prefaced  with  a  distinct  and  em- 
phatic approval  of  private  rather  than  public  prayer. 
Moreover,  ages  of  religious  decadence  have  al- 
ways made  relatively  more  of  religious  worship  and 
less  of  the  actually  religious  life.  Revivals  may 
increase  church  attendance,  and  may  open  the 
mouths  of  many  in  public  testimony  and  prayer 
who  were  silent  before,  and  may  re-establish  many  a 
family  altar;  but  the  deeper  and  more  abiding  they 
are,  the  more  they  draw  men  away  from  mere  de- 
pendence upon  churches  and  forms,  and  the  more 
they  emphasize  spirit  and  life.  Whenever  the 
churchgoing  and  the  testimony  and  the  singing  and 
praying  become  an  end  in  themselves,  the  cause  of 
religion  is  more  injured  than  helped.  Formal  wor- 
ship is  worse  than  useless  when  it  becomes  a  sub- 
stitute for  the  life  which  is  "  hid  with  Christ  in 
God,"  that  is,  for  spiritual  fellowship  with  the 
divine.  To  appreciate  the  worth  of  worship,  one 
must  first  of  all  recognize  its  subordinate  place. 
To  withstand  those  influences  in  our  time  which 
make  against  worship  "  in  spirit  and  in  truth,"  the 
Christian  of  to-day  must  see  clearly  how  much  more 
there  is  in  worship  than  time  and  place  and  form, 
and  must  be  ready  to  admit  that  here  especially 
"  The  letter  killeth,"  and  only  the  spirit  "  giveth 
life." 


48        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

Our  word  worship  means  originally  and  essen- 
tially not  form,  but  moral  attitude.  Worship  is  a 
modification  of  "  worth-ship."  Wherever  there  is 
a  sense  of  worthiness  there  is  worship.  The  greater 
the  sense  of  worthiness  the  more  profound  is  the 
worship.  The  worship  that  is  not  based  upon  a 
deep  sense  of  worthiness  is  really  no  worship  at  all. 
It  may  be  nothing  more  than  a  kind  of  religious 
sensuousness.  Such  is  often  the  effect  of  "  a  dim, 
religious  light,"  of  the  music  which  "  hath  charms 
to  soothe  the  savage  breast,"  yet  leaves  him  no  less 
a  savage  than  before,  of  soporific  incense  and  into- 
nation, of  all  the  circumstance  of  showy  ceremonial 
and  pretentious  rite.  This  is  primarily  an  appeal  to 
the  senses,  and  not  to  the  spirit.  There  may  be  life 
in  it,  but  it  is  life  girt  about  and  all  but  smothered 
with  unnecessary  clothes.  Such  worship  has  all  the 
danger  and  disadvantage  of  the  fashionable  woman's 
extreme  devotion  to  dress — it  dwarfs  and  shrivels 
the  soul.  On  the  whole,  we  are  dressing  more 
simply  and  more  sensibly  than  our  forebears  did. 
And  we  are  also  learning  more  of  the  simplicity 
of  that  worship  which  the  gospel  of  Christ  inspires. 

When  a  man  lifts  his  hat  to  a  woman,  he  rec- 
ognizes the  worth  of  womanhood,  otherwise  the 
courtesy  is  an  empty  form.  The  act  is  good  in 
itself,  but  it  is  chiefly  good  as  indicating  what  ought 
to  be  the  habitual  attitude  of  mind  and  heart  on  the 
part  of  every  man  toward  every  woman.  He  who 
does  not  reverence  woman  in  his  life,  does  not  truly 


The  Gospel  and  Worship  49 

show  her  deference  at  all.  Likewise,  when  a  man 
salutes  the  flag,  he  does  it  first  of  all  in  his  heart, 
and  justifies  it  with  his  life,  or  else  his  pretended 
patriotism  is  like  unto  that  which  Samuel  Johnson 
declared  "  the  last  refuge  of  a  scoundrel."  The 
lifting  of  the  hat  to  a  woman  and  the  salutation  of 
the  flag  are  not  forms  to  be  despised,  but  they  are 
forms  which  need  very  much  to  be  guarded  against 
insincerity  and  the  perfunctory  mood.  Those  who 
sweep  the  hat  lowest  are  often  quickest  to  follow 
the  exaggerated  courtesy  with  some  cynical  re- 
mark about  women.  And  those  who  make  much  of 
flag  worship  are  not  infrequently  the  hirelings  and 
tools  of  all  those  forces  which  make  most  against 
the  national  welfare.  Spread-eagleism  and  real 
patriotism  are  usually  a  long  way  apart. 

The  life  of  Jesus  was  one  long  act  of  worship, 
in  that  his  every  word  and  deed  was  saturated 
with  the  sense  of  spiritual  values.  He  taught  his 
disciples  to  "  pray  without  ceasing,"  at  the  same 
time  that  he  warned  them  against  long  prayers. 
There  is  no  contradiction  here,  but  the  profoundest 
harmony.  He  who  does  not  pray  always  does  not 
really  pray  at  all.  The  prayers  that  God  hears  are 
the  prayers  that  a  man  lives.  "  Your  life  speaks  so 
loudly  that  I  cannot  hear  what  you  say,"  is  especially 
pertinent  with  respect  to  prayer.  Prayer  is  essen- 
tially moral  attitude.  Singing  is  nothing  but  sound 
unless  it  is  "  making  melody  in  your  heart  to  the 
Lord."  Kneeling  has  only  the  dubious  value  of  an 


50        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

easy-going  physical  exercise,  unless  the  habitude 
of  a  man's  life  is  that  of  reverence  for  the  infinite 
and  the  eternal.  Even  the  bread  and  wine  of  the 
communion  are  less  than  ordinary  bread  and  butter 
if  one  has  not  learned  to  commune  with  the  Father 
in  all  his  eating  and  drinking,  and  to  make  a  divine 
fellowship  of  all  his  intercourse  with  his  fellows. 
Unless  the  sense  of  God  is  natural  and  habitual  to 
the  man,  no  exceptional  attitude  of  body  and  no 
formal  phrase  from  his  lips  can  make  him  a  wor- 
shiper of  God.  God  has  less  use  for  form  con- 
sidered apart  from  the  life  than  we  have  for  the 
corn  husk  after  the  grain  is  removed.  Like  the 
husk,  the  form  is  only  good  when  it  protects  the 
life  and  aids  its  growth. 

There  may  be  less  of  formal  worship  to-day  than 
there  was  of  old.  This  may,  in  part,  be  due  to 
influences  which  are  not  good.  It  is  true,  how- 
ever, that  formal  worship  is  not  without  worth ;  nay, 
it  is  of  much  worth.  To  strip  the  husk  wholly  away 
from  the  corn,  especially  when  the  corn  is  yet  un- 
developed, is  to  invite  disaster  and  death.  So  far, 
therefore,  as  conceit  of  knowledge  leads  men  away 
from  that  "  beginning  of  wisdom  "  which  is  "  the 
fear  of  the  Lord,"  or  absorption  in  money-getting 
and  pleasure-seeking  tend  to  turn  men  away  from 
the  more  abiding  satisfaction  and  delight  of  waiting 
upon  God,  we  ought  not  to  be  indifferent  to  the  evil 
tendencies  of  the  times.  But  the  times  are  not 
wholly  evil  in  this  respect.  The  churches  are  not 


The  Gospel  and  Worship  51 

deserted.  Prayer  has  not  ceased.  Christian  song 
was  never  so  frequent  and  so  hearty  as  it  is  now. 
There  is  much  more  of  actual  communion  with 
God  than  any  man  can  measure.  And  apart  from 
all  the  forms  of  worship,  the  attitude  of  life  which 
is  the  heart  of  worship,  grows  more  commanding 
every  day.  The  gospel  of  Christ  is  far  from  cere- 
monialism. But  it  is  through  and  through  a  life  of 
worship.  It  is  "  rejoicing  in  the  Lord  always."  It  is 
perpetual  prayer.  It  is  getting  and  keeping  "  in  tune 
with  the  infinite."  It  is  ceaseless  adoration  of  the 
might  and  love  and  wisdom  which  men  feel  more 
and  more  is  in  all  and  through  all  and  over  all.  To 
worship  in  the  terms  of  the  gospel  of  Christ  is  to 
"  live  and  move  and  have  one's  being "  every  day 
in  God.  There  was  never  so  much  of  this  life  of 
worship  in  the  world  as  there  is  to-day.  And  if  the 
life  of  worship  increases,  there  is  no  need  to  fear 
that  any  needful  or  helpful  form  of  worship  will 
cease  to  be.  And  those  who  have  this  spirit  must 
see  to  it  that  helpful  form  of  worship  shall  not  cease 
to  be. 


fuiz 

I.  What  are  the  influences  which  make  most 
against  religious  worship  in  our  day?  2.  How  can 
real  religion  operate  to  decrease  worship?  3.  What 
was  the  attitude  of  Jesus  toward  public  worship? 
4.  What  is  the  meaning  of  the  word,  "  worship," 
and  what  is  it  in  spirit  and  in  truth?  5.  What 


52        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

does  it  mean  to  "  pray  without  ceasing,"  and  how  is 
this  consistent  with  the  teaching  of  Jesus  against 
long  prayers? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  The  influence  of  modern  street  railways,  the 
automobile,  the  bicycle,  and  other  forms  of  trans- 
portation upon  church  attendance.  2.  The  com- 
parative rest  value  of  Sunday  "  recreations "  and 
church  attendance.  3.  Is  the  appeal  of  music  and 
art  primarily  sensuous  or  spiritual?  4.  What  is 
the  moral  value  of  formal  worship?  5.  How  can 
the  one  who  is  spiritual  best  aid  formal  worship? 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  GOSPEL  AND  HOME  CONDUCT 

THERE  went  the  round  of  the  papers,  some  years 
ago,  a-  story,  which  was  supposed  to  be  humorous, 
but  which  was  really  very  far  from  amusing  to  any 
thoughtful  Christian  man.  According  to  the  story, 
a  certain  man  came  home  and  found,  to  his  indig- 
nation, that  a  tramp  had  called  in  his  absence,  and 
had  been  very  harsh  and  insulting  to  his  wife.  The 
man  was  very  much  incensed,  and  at  length,  turning 
angrily  upon  his  son,  a  youth  of  twelve  or  four- 
teen years  of  age,  asked  sharply,  "  Where  were 
you,  Harry,  when  this  occurred  ?  "  "I  was  in  the 
woodshed/'  answered  the  boy  with  some  confusion. 
"  Couldn't  you  hear  the  man  talking  to  your 
mother  ?  "  demanded  the  father,  more  severely  now. 
"  Yes,"  replied  the  lad  shamefacedly.  "  Then  why 
didn't  you  interfere  ?  "  thundered  the  irate  father, 
ready  to  vent  his  vexation  upon  the  child.  But 
the  boy  made  answer,  still  hanging  his  head,  and 
without-any  impertinence  in  his  manner,  "  Because, 
father,  I — I — I  thought  it  was  you." 

It  is  hardly  too  much  to  allow  that  this  might 
have  happened  in  many  a  professedly  Christian 
home.  There  are  Christian  men,  at  least  men  of 

53 


54        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

Christian  profession  not  a  few,  who  habitually  talk 
to  their  wives  and  children  in  a  manner  which  they 
would  not  for  a  moment  tolerate  from  an  outsider. 
They  snarl  and  scold  and  browbeat  in  a  way  in 
which  no  gentleman  would  address  a  stranger  of 
either  sex.  And  in  this  respect  it  is  only  fair  to 
say  women  are  sometimes  almost,  if  not  quite,  as 
bad.  They  nag  and  whine  and  fret  and  fume  in  the 
home,  and  are  all  smiles  and  graciousness  on  the 
outside.  So  also,  in  many  a  Christian  home,  brothers 
and  sisters  indulge  in  language  toward  each  other 
which  they  would  not  stand  from  anybody  else. 
Many  a  Christian  boy,  if  overheard  by  his  girl 
friends  talking  to  his  sister  or  mother  after  the 
manner  in  which  he  frequently  "  talks  back "  at 
them,  would  hardly  lift  his  face  before  his  friends 
again.  And  the  sisters  are  not  by  any  means  fault- 
less with  respect  to  their  manners  toward  their  inti- 
mates in  the  home. 

This  bad  behavior  in  the  home  does  not  mean 
that  genuine  affection  is  lacking  between  those  who 
thus  abuse  each  other.  Often  people  who  strive 
with  each  other  irascibly  all  day  long  will  resent 
bitterly  any  slightest  reflection  by  an  outsider  upon 
the  object  of  their  ordinary  irritation.  Even  the 
mother  who  hardly  ever  gives  her  child  a  pleasant 
look  or  a  pleasant  word  will  slave  for  the  lad  far 
into  the  night,  and  will  weep  over  his  coffin  in  an 
utterly  heartbroken  way  when  the  aggravating 
feet  and  hands  are  forever  stilled.  Perhaps  the 


The  Gospel  and  Home  Conduct  55 

saddest  thing  about  our  frequent  bad  behavior 
toward  each  other  in  the  home  is  the  fact  that  we 
cover  up  with  roughness  and  harshness  the  tender- 
ness we  would  give  the  world  to  express.  But  we 
are  afraid  of  sentiment,  and  ashamed  of  our  own 
awkwardness  when  we  try  to  be  gentle  to  each  other, 
and  it  is  wofully  easy  to  vent  our  irritation  and 
weariness  and  depression  of  spirits  upon  others, 
especially  upon  those  who  know  us  and  love  us,  so 
that  we  can  presume  upon  their  love  as  we  dare  not 
presume  upon  the  courtesy  of  a  stranger.  We 
know,  and  we  feel  sure  that  they  know,  the  sincerity 
of  our  affection  for  them,  in  spite  of  the  discourteous 
and  often  disgraceful  manner  in  which  we  talk  and 
act  toward  them.  Our  very  sincerity  is  more  than 
half  the  reason  for  our  severity. 

Nor  does  all  this  rudeness  mean  that  the  Chris- 
tian profession  of  those  who  are  guilty  of  this  harsh 
and  unhappy  home  conduct  is  nothing  but  pious 
pretense.  They  are  often  quite  as  sincere  in  their 
love  for  God  and  for  the  things  of  the  kingdom  of 
God  as  they  are  genuine  in  their  affection  toward 
the  loved  ones  whom  they  abuse.  There  is  a  wide 
distance  between  insincerity  and  inconsistency.  It 
is  neither  wise  nor  just  to  impeach  altogether  a 
man's  Christian  character  because  he  sometimes  acts 
like  a  boor  in  the  home.  But  when  he  is  acting  the 
boor,  he  is  certainly  not  acting  the  Christian  part. 
If  the  gospel  is  an  actual  saving  power  here  and 
now,  it  ought  to  give  us  the  victory  in  the  home. 


56        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

And  the  gospel  will,  when  it  is  faithfully  applied  in 
every  aspect  of  everyday  life.  When  every  allow- 
ance is  made  for  the  sincerity  of  our  affection  for 
our  kindred  and  household,  despite  our  unloving 
manners  toward  them,  and  for  the  genuineness  of 
our  religious  profession  despite  the  frequent  viola- 
tion of  Christian  courtesy  and  decency  in  the  privacy 
of  the  family  circle,  it  is  still  true  that  failure  in 
Christian  living  at  home  is  both  dangerous  to  the 
home  and  disastrous  to  the  whole  development  of 
character.  No  man  rises  very  much  higher  than  his 
home  life. 

There  is  a  kind  of  cowardice  about  this  rudeness 
at  home  which  ought  to  go  far  to  shame  us  out  of 
it  when  it  is  rightly  understood.  We  take  liberties 
with  our  loved  ones  which  we  simply  do  not  dare 
to  take  with  strangers.  They  would  not  stand  for 
the  tone  in  which  we  often  speak  in  the  home,  let 
alone  the  insulting  roughness  of  what  we  say.  If 
they  did  not  retaliate  in  kind  they  would  surely 
"  cut  us  "  from  that  hour.  The  intimates  of  the 
home  can  hardly  do  so.  They  may,  indeed,  answer 
back  after  the  same  manner,  which  does  but  make 
the  matter  worse.  They  cannot  very  well  cut  us 
out  of  the  circle  of  their  acquaintance,  and  refuse 
to  have  anything  further  to  do  with  us  as  outsiders 
may  very  justly  do.  Therefore,  we  ought  to  be  the 
gentler  toward  them,  because  of  their  very  helpless- 
ness against  us.  If  we  are  not  so,  it  is  because  we 
are  taking  a  coward's  advantage  of  their  situation, 


The  Gospel  and  Home  Conduct  57 

and  doing  toward  them  what  we  lack  the  courage  to 
do  on  a  level  where  our  rudeness  would  meet  its 
adequate  reward.  The  more  cowardly  a  man  or  boy 
is,  the  more  likely  he  is  to  play  the  boor  at  home. 

Moreover,  the  manner  in  which  we  excuse  our- 
selves for  our  bad  conduct  at  home  is  often  anything 
but  honest.  "  Mamma,"  said  a  sharp-witted  little 
girl,  who  had  been  savagely  taken  to  task  by  her 
mother  for  a  show  of  ill  temper,  "  why  do  you  call 
it  '  cross '  when  it's  me,  and  '  nervous '  when  its 
you  ? "  Most  of  us  are  exceedingly  ready  with 
excuses  when  we  ourselves  are  irritable  and  disa- 
greeable and  sharp  tongued  and  peevishly  fault- 
finding. We  are  "  tired,"  or  "  fatigued,"  or  "  not 
feeling  very  well,"  or  we  have  "  an  awful  head- 
ache " ;  indeed,  we  can  find  a  hundred  reasons  for 
our  mean  conduct  except  the  simple  truth  that  we 
are  in  bad  temper  and  have  not  the  Christian  candor 
and  courage  to  control  ourselves.  When  we  are 
willing  to  own  the  truth,  and  to  lay  the  chief  blame 
where  it  belongs,  at  our  own  door,  we  shall  be 
already  on  the  way  to  victory  over  the  infirmities 
of  our  disposition. 

This  is  not  to  deny  that  life  at  home  is  some- 
times truly  more  trying  than  it  is  on  the  outside. 
Life's  little  irritations  have  their  opportunity  against 
us  when  we  are  doing  the  daily  drudgery  and  meet- 
ing the  very  commonplace  experiences  of  the  fire- 
side as  they  have  not  when  we  are  dressed  in  our 
best,  and  looking  our  best,  and  we  meet  men  and 


58        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

women  on  the  serener  levels  of  social  intercourse. 
It  is  always  easier  to  keep  the  flies  out  of  the  parlor 
than  it  is  to  keep  them  out  of  the  kitchen.  The 
buzzing,  stinging,  irritating  little  annoyances  of  life 
also  like  the  warm,  sticky,  and  stifling  atmosphere 
of  hard,  prosaic  work.  Or  they  are  like  the  dust 
which  fills  the  city  streets,  and  puts  a  man's  temper 
on  edge,  when  the  same  man  would  walk  with  smi- 
ling memories  of  his  boyhood  thronging  all  the 
chambers  of  his  soul  as  he  pressed  softly  the  green 
sward  of  the  country  field.  The  grit  that  gets 
into  our  shoes  is  more  trying  to  us  by  far  than  the 
big  boulders  over  which  we  climb  with  conscious 
ease.  So  many  a  man  and  woman  who  will  meet  a 
great  trial  with  strong  uplift  of  soul  will  fail  miser- 
ably to  meet  like  a  Christian  the  grit  of  the  com- 
mon day's  work.  Gulliver,  in  the  land  of  the  Lilli- 
putians, could  break  any  single  rope  with  which  they 
sought  to  bind  him ;  but  when  they  found  him  pros- 
trate and  tied  their  thousand  threads  to  every 
tenderest  part  of  him  that  was  exposed,  weaving 
the  web  into  his  hair,  he  found  these  threads,  and 
the  thousands  of  tiny  darts  discharged  against  him 
when  he  tried  to  break  away,  too  much  for  him. 
The  Lilliputians  are  in  all  our  homes,  and  their 
little  threads  and  darts  are  more  dangerous  to  our 
Christian  liberty  and  to  Christian  serenity  of  soul 
than  any  Apollyon's  sword  that  can  be  wielded 
against  us. 

The  home  was  the  patriarchal  church.    It  is  still 


The  Gospel  and  Home  Conduct  59 

the  first  place  in  which  to  build  our  altars  to  the 
Lord.  Worship,  as  already  emphasized,  is  primarily 
an  attitude  of  the  soul.  And  the  primary  place  to 
demonstrate  that  attitude  is  the  home.  If  a  man's 
life  is  filled  with  the  sense  of  God  he  will  not  forget 
God  at  his  own  hearthside.  "  If  a  man  have  not  the 
spirit  of  Christ,  he  is  none  of  his."  And  if  the 
spirit  of  Christ  is  in  the  man,  he  will  not  wholly 
fail  of  showing  forth  that  spirit  in  the  most  inti- 
mate and  trying  situations  of  home  life.  For  man 
or  woman  the  foremost  test  of  the  genuineness  of 
faith  and  love  toward  Christ  is  its  working  worth 
in  the  home  circle,  what  it  actually  accomplishes 
to  raise  the  level  of  decency  and  discipline  in  the 
home. 

Neither  in  the  home  nor  anywhere  else  is  the  all 
in  all  of  religion  pleasure.  There  is  a  difference 
between  friction  and  irritation,  between  authority 
and  asperity.  We  are  not  likely  wholly  to  eliminate 
friction  for  a  while,  if  we  ever  do.  Neither  have 
we  wholly  passed  from  under  the  need  of  authority. 
A  Christian  home  life  does  not  mean  an  easy- 
going indifference  to  the  infraction  of  reasonable 
rules,  or  the  ignoring  of  mutual  rights.  "  I  never 
knew  but  one  man  without  a  temper,"  remarked  a 
certain  excellent  woman  who,  like  Will  Carleton's 
"  Betsey,"  had  "  a  temper  of  her  own,"  and  she 
added  with  a  wry  laugh,  "  and  he  was  the  most 
aggravating  man  that  I  ever  knew."  There  is 
nothing  necessarily  unchristian  in  the  possession  of 


60        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

a  temper.  Indeed,  the  "  possession  "  of  a  temper  is 
not  that  to  which  moralists  generally  object,  it  is 
rather  the  "  losing "  of  one's  temper ;  in  other 
words,  the  not  possessing  it  enough  to  have  control 
over  it.  A  Christian  home  is  not  a  home  without 
temper  in  it,  but  it  is  a  home  where  temper  is 
under  the  control  of  Christian  motive  and  Christian 
forbearance.  We  may  go  farther  and  say  that  a 
Christian  home  life  is  not  in  terms  of  reasonable 
ordinary  expectation  a  faultless  regime  of  exact 
righteousness.  David  was  a  man  of  many  blem- 
ishes. He  was  "  a  man  after  God's  own  heart " ; 
not  because  he  was  always  right  in  conduct,  but 
rather  because  the  prevailing  disposition  of  his  life 
was  right.  He  loved,  and  loved  generously,  and 
was  not  too  proud  to  be  penitent  nor  too  self- 
opinionated  to  be  brokenhearted  over  his  own  short- 
comings. So  also  was  Peter  a  man  of  many  in- 
firmities of  daily  life,  a  big  blunderer  in  his  ways, 
but  as  big-hearted  in  his  tears  and  self-rebukings  as 
he  was  hasty  and  impetuous  in  his  speech.  We  love 
him,  not  for  his  faultlessness,  but  for  his  essential 
and  enduring  lovingness.  A  Christian  home  life 
will  not  be  always  pleasant.  It  will  not  be  without 
friction,  and  certainly  not  without  authority.  It 
will  not  be  without  its  frequent  faults  and  failures. 
To  expect  too  much  of  it  is  to  invite  the  discourage- 
ment which  makes  for  worse  defeat.  But  it  will  be 
animated  with  a  Christian  purpose,  the  spirit  of 
mutual  service,  and  the  friction  and  fault  of  it  will 


The  Gospel  and  Home  Conduct  61 

be  mitigated  and  in  increasing  measure  overcome  by 
a  willing  forgiveness  of  offenses  and  a  ready  recog- 
nition of  "  the  law  of  Christ." 

In  the  largest  way  this  is  the  test  of  the  working 
of  the  gospel  in  home  life.  It  is  very  much  to  be 
desired  that  courtesy  should  prevail  in  the  intimacies 
of  the  home  circle.  Harshness  and  rudeness  are 
shamefully  out  of  place  in  a  Christian  home.  The 
young  man  or  young  woman  who  professes  to  love 
Christ,  and  bears  testimony  thereto  in  public  meet- 
ing, ought  to  seek  with  painstaking  conscientious- 
ness to  testify  for  Christ  in  the  much  more  difficult 
declaration  of  the  daily  life,  and  especially  in  a 
decent  and  orderly  walk  at  home.  But  let  us  not 
lose  sight  here  of  what  the  distinctive  thing  about 
the  gospel  really  is.  The  gospel  is  not  simply  a 
moral  code.  It  is  very  much  more.  There  may  be 
social  and  moral  propriety  without  the  dominating 
doctrine  of  Christ.  His  gospel  is,  indeed,  a  life; 
but  it  is  much  more  than  an  outwardly  correct  life, 
more  even  than  a  life  which  is  correct  in  outward 
appearance  when  viewed  from  the  close  standpoint 
of  the  fireside.  The  life  is  only  Christian  when  it  is 
through  and  through  a  life  of  love.  We  must  strive 
for  perfection,  indeed,  and  perfection  will  not  be 
satisfied  merely  to  "  mean  well "  the  while  we  are 
carelessly  doing  evil.  We  must  not  continue  in 
sin  "  that  grace  may  abound,"  continue  in  unloving 
conduct  and  excuse  it  by  claiming  that  nevertheless 
we  have  the  loving  spirit.  If  we  are  faithful  to 


62        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

love  within  us  it  will  certainly  manifest  itself  in 
word  and  deed.  Yet  it  is  not  propriety  nor  out- 
ward perfectness  by  which  we  may  know  the  Chris- 
tian home  first  of  all.  It  is  the  Christian  spirit 
rather,  the  spirit  of  humility,  the  spirit  of  forgive- 
ness, the  spirit  of  readiness  to  be  reconciled ;  it  is 
the  spirit  of  the  self-effacingness  and  all-lovingness 
of  the  cross.  The  Fifty-first  psalm,  the  Beatitudes 
of  Jesus,  the  Master's  prayer  on  the  cross,  these 
are  all  tokens  of  that  mind  which  ought  to  dis- 
tinguish the  Christian  home. 

And  nowhere  are  the  rewards  of  Christian  living 
larger  than  they  are  at  home.  To  have  the  approval 
of  "  them  that  are  without "  is  worth  while  for  any 
Christian ;  but  how  much  more  does  it  mean  to 
have  the  approval  of  them  that  are  within  the  range 
of  the  most  intimate  daily  life?  To  lead  a  stranger 
to  Christ  is  an  unspeakable  privilege,  but  so  to 
live  and  speak  as  to  lead  one's  own  brother  or  sister 
to  the  Master  is  to  reap  a  double  reward.  It  is  not 
without  meaning  that  we  have  this  record  concern- 
ing Andrew,  "  he  first  findeth  his  own  brother 
Simon."  If  our  Christian  living  does  not  "  find  " 
those  who  are  nearest  to  us,  there  is  something 
seriously  the  matter  with  it.  And  if  it  does,  there 
is  unspeakable  comfort  in  the  high  compliment  of 
such  confidence,  there  is  an  assurance  which  the 
world  will  not  be  slow  to  appreciate  that  our  foun- 
dations are  sound,  and  there  is  a  foretaste  already 
in  the  rich  enjoyments  of  a  Christian  home  life 


The  Gospel  and  Home  Conduct  63 

of  that  better  life  beyond  which  we  cannot  conceive 
as  yet,  but  which  we  do  most  significantly  suggest 
when  we  speak  of  heaven  as  our  everlasting  home. 

*** 
Quiz 

I.  How  do  you  explain  the  frequent  boorishness 
toward  each  other  of  members  of  the  same  family 
who  are  sincerely  fond  of  one  another?  2.  Can  a 
man  be  habitually  discourteous  in  the  family  circle 
and  yet  be  a  Christian  ?  3.  Has  a  Christian  a  right 
to  be  severe  under  any  circumstances  in  the  exercise 
of  family  authority?  4.  What  is  a  Christian  tem- 
per? 5.  What  are  the  chief  marks  of  a  Christian 
spirit  ? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

I.  Are  we  growing  away  from  home  life?  2.  Is 
family  worship  every  day  desirable  and  practicable 
in  the  average  modern  home?  3.  How  shall  we  de- 
velop a  helpful  candor  in  the  home  as  to  matters  of 
religious  experience?  4.  Is  the  average  of  home 
conduct  improving,  and  if  so,  is  this  directly  re- 
lated to  the  improved  status  of  woman?  5.  Would 
a  more  equal  participation  of  woman  in  public  life 
make  for  more  Christian  standards  at  home? 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   GOSPEL   WORKING    IN   THE    CHURCH 

THERE  is  a  disposition  in  many  quarters  to-day  to 
put  "  churchianity  "  and  Christianity  in  opposition 
to  each  other.  One  notable  instance  has  been  much 
cited,  concerning  an  audience  of  working  men  in 
New  York  City,  who  applauded  the  name  of  Christ, 
and  hissed  immediately  afterward  the  mention  of 
the  church.  All  over  the  land  there  are  many  who 
speak  respectfully  of  Jesus  who  criticize  most  harsh- 
ly all  the  churches  which  profess  to  speak  in  his 
name.  It  is  comparatively  easy  to  get  a  whole  con- 
gregation to  rise  if  the  question  is  one  of  Christian 
faith.  It  is  more  and  more  difficult  to  get  those  who 
acquiesce  in  the  reasonableness  of  religion  and  the 
claims  of  Christ  to  admit  the  claims  of  church-mem- 
bership and  church  activity  upon  them. 

Yet,  the  churches  were  never  so  numerous  as 
they  are  to-day,  and  probably  on  the  whole,  never  so 
effective.  There  was  never  so  much  of  the  gospel 
outside  of  the  churches  as  there  is  to-day,  and  there 
was  never  so  much  of  the  gospel  inside  of  the 
churches.  In  spite  of  all  real  and  apparent  opposi- 
tion to  the  churches,  the  gospel  is  working  in  and 
through  them  as  never  before,  and  more  than  half 
64 


The  Gospel  Working  in  the  Church  65 

the  protest  against  them  is  an  indirect  tribute  to 
them,  the  tribute  of  men  who  have  learned  from 
the  churches  how  much  more  the  churches  ought 
to  be.  Those  who  are  most  impatient  with  the 
churches  now,  would  be  many  fold  more  impatient 
if  they  were  brought  face  to  face  with  the  church 
life  of  other  centuries.  Even  the  "  apostolic 
churches,"  which  we  have  exceedingly  idealized, 
would  probably  prove  profoundly  disappointing  if 
we  immediately  confronted  them. 

How  difficult  it  is  to  find  men  and  women  of 
intelligence  now,  and  with  any  appreciation  of 
Christian  ideas  and  ideals  who  have  not,  at  one 
time  or  another,  shared  the  beneficent  ministry  of 
the  Sunday-school.  They  may  boast  that  they  have 
not  been  inside  a  church  "  in  twenty  years,"  but  if 
you  catch  them  unawares  they  will  boast  quite  as 
emphatically  that  they  know  all  about  the  churches 
because,  in  youth,  they  were  regular  frequenters  of 
the  Sunday-school  or,  even  "  forced  to  go  to  church 
three  times  a  day."  This  is  an  admission  in  fact, 
if  not  in  form,  that  so  much  of  the  gospel  as  has 
found  them,  came  to  them  through  the  church,  next 
to  the  direct  ministry  of  the  home.  And  with 
many  of  them  the  home  training  was  religiously 
negative,  and  all  that  they  have  learned  of  Chris- 
tian precept  and  principle  they  have  gathered  from 
the  Sunday-school  or  from  occasional  attendance 
upon  the  preaching  of  the  word. 

Very  few  even  of  those  who  work  in  the  Sunday- 


66        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

school  to-day  apprehend  how  widespread  the  in- 
fluence of  the  Sunday-school  is.  It  is  not  only  true 
that  the  majority  of  those  who  join  the  churches 
come  to  church-membership  by  way  of  the  Sunday- 
school  ;  but,  as  already  suggested,  the  Sunday-school 
reaches  in  very  influential  ways  a  multitude  who  are 
lost  to  church  attendance  in  later  years.  Undoubt- 
edly it  is  a  misfortune  that  the  churches  do  not  hold 
them.  But  just  as  when  our  loved  ones  die  we  are 
apt  to  think  of  the  fact  that  we  have  lost  them  more 
than  we  do  of  the  fact  that  we  have  had  them;  so 
do  we  sometimes  over-emphasize  the  fact  that  the 
church  does  not  hold  all  who  have  been  under  its 
instruction,  and  ignore  the  value  of  the  fact  that  at 
least  the  church  had  much  to  do  with  the  shaping  of 
their  lives  for  a  little  while.  Much  more  than  half 
of  the  decency  and  respectability  of  the  world  out- 
side of  the  churches  is  due  to  the  touch  of  the 
gospel  upon  these  men  and  women  in  their  impres- 
sionable years  before  they  turned  aside  from  the 
Sunday-school.  If  the  Sunday-schools  did  no  more 
than  this,  they  would  be  well  worth  while.  In  fact, 
the  Sunday-schools  do  a  great  deal  more.  Much 
of  their  teaching  is  very  superficial,  but  there  is  very 
little  of  it  which  is  not,  in  some  degree,  beneficial. 
Moreover,  the  character  of  the  work  is  greatly  im- 
proving from  year  to  year.  There  are  few  better 
ways  of  learning  what  the  gospel  is  than  to  attempt 
to  teach  it  conscientiously  in  a  modern  Sunday- 
school.  Expression  makes  for  impression.  Espe- 


The  Gospel  Working  in  the  Church  67 

cially  does  explanation  within  the  range  of  the  un- 
derstanding of  a  child  bring  one  back  to  the  things 
that  are  of  first  importance  in  the  gospel  of  Christ. 
This  is  another  indirect  ministry  of  the  Sunday- 
schools.  They  are  unsurpassed  gymnasiums  for 
the  exercise  of  all  those  who  teach  and  work 
in  them.  He  is  a  very  poor  teacher  who  does  not 
learn  more  than  his  scholars.  To  get  at  the  very 
heart  of  the  gospel,  one  needs  to  try  to  tell  it 
over  and  over,  week  after  week,  to  a  child.  It  is 
possible,  of  course,  merely  to  entertain  the  child.  It 
is  easier  yet  simply  to  compel  the  attention  of  the 
child  without  so  much  as  entertaining  him.  But  the 
young  Christian  who  goes  at  it  right,  and  stays  with 
the  task  faithfully,  will  sooner  or  later  learn  to  know 
some  of  the  deep  things  of  the  gospel  through  in- 
terpreting the  Scriptures  to  the  understanding  of 
girls  and  boys.  What  the  Sunday-schools  are  doing 
in  general  moral  influence  upon  those  whom  the 
churches  do  not  hold  is  worth  while.  What  the 
Sunday-schools  are  doing  for  those  who  operate 
them  and  are  teachers  in  them  through  the  reflex 
influence  of  their  work  upon  themselves  is  even 
more  worth  while.  And,  besides  this,  there  is  the 
incalculable  worth  of  the  work  for  those  who  are 
thereby  led  to  accept  the  gospel  and  give  them- 
selves to  the  service  of  the  kingdom  of  God.  No 
man  who  knows  what  the  gospel  is,  and  believes  in 
it,  can  for  a  minute  despise  its  working  in  the  Sun- 
day-school to-day. 


68        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

In  the  minds  of  many,  the  young  people's  move- 
ment has  spent  its  force.  If  this  is  true,  its  force 
has  not  been  spent  in  vain.  It  has  added  very  much 
to  the  cheerfulness  of  present-day  religion.  Edward 
Payson  and  Francis  E.  Clark  were  pastors  in  the 
same  city,  of  churches  of  the  same  denomination. 
Their  ministries  fell  only  a  little  more  than  half  a 
century  apart.  There  is  no  doubt  that  Edward 
Payson  was  a  saint,  according  to  the  standards  of 
his  time.  He  was  certainly  esteemed  as  such  by  the 
Christian  community  in  New  England  a  century 
ago.  It  is  said  that  on  a  single  morning  the  birth 
notices  in  the  Boston  papers  showed  six  little 
Edward  Paysons  to  whom  the  name  of  the  New 
England  saint  had  been  given.  Yet  he  was  a  most 
melancholy  and  even  morbid  saint.  The  contrast 
between  Payson  and  Clark  is  much  more  than  per- 
sonal, otherwise  it  would  not  be  mentioned  here. 
It  is  the  contrast  between  the  ascetic,  John  the  Bap- 
tist piety  of  the  puritanism  of  yesterday  and  the 
saner,  sounder,  and  far  more  Christian  type  of  re- 
ligion which  prevails  to-day.  The  young  people's 
movement  in  the  churches  has  done  much  to  de- 
liver us  from  the  unnatural  and  unhealthful  serious- 
ness of  the  religion  of  a  century  ago.  The  whole- 
some manliness  and  happy  helpfulness  of  "  Father 
Endeavor  "  Clark  is  typical  of  the  whole  movement 
in  which  he  has  played  such  honorable  part.  Our 
young  people's  movement  may  be  "  too  light "  in 
many  of  its  manifestations,  but  it  is  certainly  much 


The  Gospel  Working  in  the  Church          69 

more  like  the  ministry  of  Jesus  than  the  sickly 
scntimentalism  and  exaggerated  sanctimoniousness 
which  was  mistaken  for  Christianity  awhile  ago. 
Even  so  good  a  tract  as  "  The  Dairyman's  Daugh- 
ter," marks  the  melancholy  of  ordinary  religious 
propaganda  until  recent  times.  The  very  Sunday- 
schools  used  to  teach  the  children  to  sing: 

"  I  want  to  be  an  angel, 

And  with  the  angels  stand, 
A  crown  upon  my  forehead, 
And  a  harp  within  my  hand." 

A  sentiment  this  which  never  for  a  minute  belonged 
to  any  sensible  child.  If  the  young  people's  move- 
ment has  done  its  work,  it  has  done  its  work  well  in 
hastening  the  departure  of  this  hypochondria  in 
religion. 

But  it  remains  to  be  proved  that  the  young  peo- 
ple's movement  has  spent  its  force.  There  is  very 
much  to  show  that  it  has  not.  The  young  people's 
societies  are  still  with  us,  and  a  multitude  of  them 
are  doing  very  effective  work.  The  work  might  be 
both  deeper  and  broader  than  it  is.  "  Confessing 
Christ "  is  good,  but  it  ought  to  mean  something 
more  than  a  parrotlike  repetition  of  a  familiar 
phrase,  and  a  half-hearted  request  for  the  prayers  of 
other  people  as  a  kind  of  easy  substitute  for  earnest 
and  thoughtful  effort  on  one's  own  behalf.  "  Ral- 
lies "  are  all  right,  if  they  mark  real  progress ;  but 


70        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

a  standard  that  stands  still,  though  it  may  serve  as 
a  May-pole  for  mere  merrymakers  to  go  around  and 
around,  will  never  lead  an  army  to  victory.  It  is 
rather  pitiful  to  find  in  a  prominent  Eastern  city, 
which  is  filled  all  summer  long  with  visitors  from  all 
over  the  world,  that  the  Christian  young  people's 
societies  have  adjourned  for  a  period  of  months, 
and  the  only  sign  of  their  existence  is  a  momentary 
revival  for  the  sake  of  a  moonlight  excursion  upon 
the  bay.  Yet,  to  reason  from  these  things  that  the 
gospel  is  not  working,  and  working  to  very  good 
effect  in  and  through  the  young  people's  societies, 
is  to  confess  ignorance  of  much  of  the  most  vital 
Christian  literature  and  the  most  wholesome  and 
enterprising  Christian  life  of  our  time. 

In  this  study  of  the  working  of  the  church  in 
modern  life,  the  Sunday-school  and  the  young  peo- 
ple's societies  are  put  first,  not  because  they  are 
necessarily  first  in  their  demonstration  of  the  gos- 
pel, but  because  they  are  most  immediately  related 
to  the  young  Christian,  and  through  them  the  young 
Christian  comes  into  vital,  personal  activity  in  the 
church.  The  Sunday-school  of  a  church  is  nearly 
always  what  its  young  people  are.  It  can  be  made 
more  effective  only  as  they  become  more  effective. 
In  point  of  intelligence  it  is  seldom  beyond  the  intel- 
lectual life  of  the  young  people.  It  is  not  always  up 
to  them  in  this  respect.  It  is  for  them  to  make  it  so. 
It  is  for  them  to  make  the  Sunday-school  also  an 
effective  evangelistic  and  missionary  agency.  At 


The  Gospel  Working  in  the  Church  71 

no  point  is  there  nobler  opportunity  for  enlargement 
and  improvement  in  Christian  service  than  through 
intelligent,  painstaking  devotion  upon  the  part  of  the 
young  men  and  young  women  of  the  church  to  the 
best  type  of  Sunday-school  service.  Their  own  so- 
ciety is  less  important  than  the  Sunday-school.  Yet 
their  own  society  can  be  made,  next  to  the  Sunday- 
school,  the  most  immediately  effective  auxiliary  of 
the  church.  Its  prayer  meetings  can  be  made  promo- 
tive  of  something  more  than  a  trite  and  tasteless  testi- 
mony through  indolent  indulgence  in  formal  phrase- 
ology. Its  socials  can  be  broadened  and  deepened  so 
as  to  be  beyond  all  suspicion  of  caste  and  clique 
feeling  and  frivolous  entertainment,  and  so  as  to 
answer  to  the  profoundest  longings  of  the  heart  of 
youth  for  worthy  fellowship  and  real  enjoyment  of 
life.  Our  young  people's  societies  do  not  begin  to 
make  what  they  ought  to  make  of  their  literary  op- 
portunity. They  ought  to  stimulate  right  reading 
on  the  part  of  their  members.  They  ought  to  offer 
the  best  in  books  and  pamphlets  to  all  who  attend 
upon  their  meetings.  They  ought  to  utilize  the  de- 
nominational papers  for  a  good  clipping  bureau, 
the  clippings  to  be  arranged  somewhat  after  the 
card  index  style,  and  kept  for  ready  reference  where 
all  the  members  of  the  church  can  get  at  them. 
They  ought  especially  to  be  in  touch  with  the  best 
social  service  of  their  own  community,  keeping  their 
members  informed  about  it,  and  as  far  as  they  can, 
getting  into  active  touch  with  such  service  them- 


72        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

selves.  In  a  word,  the  young  people's  society  ought 
to  be  a  kind  of  a  committee  of  the  whole  on  the 
part  of  the  youth  of  the  church  to  keep  the  church  in 
contact  with  the  freshest  developments  of  Christian 
thought  and  manifestations  of  Christian  activity. 
Every  good  work  in  the  community  ought  to  feel 
their  hand  in  sympathetic  touch  upon  it.  They 
ought  to  hold  what  the  Sunday-school  has  gained, 
and  recover  very  much  of  what  the  Sunday-school 
has  lost. 

When  all  has  been  said  that  can  be  said  for  Sun- 
day-school and  young  people's  society,  and  every 
other  auxiliary  of  the  church,  the  pulpit  is  still  the 
citadel  of  the  church.  When  the  pulpit  is  weak, 
the  church  is  weak.  When  the  pulpit  is  strong,  the 
church  is  strong.  The  strength  of  the  pulpit  is  in 
the  strength  of  her  youth.  Nor  is  it  only  in  the 
strength  of  her  young  men.  The  young  women  who 
are  to  be  ministers'  wives  are  a  very  large  factor  in 
the  strength  or  weakness  of  the  pulpit.  Much  more 
than  this  may  be  said.  Henry  Ward  Beecher  once 
said,  "  The  minister  gives  back  to  the  people  in 
showers  what  he  takes  up  from  them  in  vapor." 
Sometimes  he  takes  up  very  little,  and  sometimes 
he  takes  up  very  much.  A  congregation  makes  a 
minister  quite  as  much  as  a  minister  makes  a  con- 
gregation. The  Gospel  "  according  to  Luke "  is 
also  the  Gospel  according  to  Theophilus.  When  you 
write  a  letter,  the  one  you  are  writing  to  is  also  the 
one  you  are  writing  through.  Very  few  Christians 


The  Gospel  Working  in  the  Church          73 

begin  to  recognize  what  part  they  have  in  every 
sermon  they  hear.  Ten  hearers  are  worth  ten  hun- 
dred sneerers  to  bring  out  the  best  that  is  in  a  man. 
Jesus  sent  men  forth  to  testify  of  "  what  great 
things  the  Lord  had  done  for  them,"  but  quite  as 
emphatically  he  reiterated,  "  He  that  hath  ears  to 
hear,  let  him  hear."  His  own  preaching  failed 
where  a  sympathetic  hearing  was  lacking.  The  pul- 
pit of  to-day  would  be  a  hundredfold  more  effective 
in  winning  the  world  to  the  gospel  if  instead  of  a 
careless,  captious,  conventional,  or  merely  conserv- 
ative hearing  the  members  of  the  churches,  and 
especially  the  younger  members,  listened  with 
whole-hearted  devotion  to  the  truth,  with  sincere 
desire  for  self-advancement,  and  with  an  intelligent 
appreciation  of  what  real  preaching  is. 

With  all  its  faults  and  failures,  the  church  is 
still  the  main  medium  for  carrying  the  gospel  to  the 
world.  Its  work  is  of  primary  and  permanent  im- 
portance at  the  point  of  contact  with  childhood  and 
youth.  The  young  Christian  will  do  well  to  put 
much  of  the  emphasis  of  his  own  activity  and  assist- 
ance there.  He  ought  to  seek  continually  to  enlarge 
and  improve  the  working  of  the  gospel  through  the 
church  in  these  beginnings  of  the  gospel  in  human 
lives.  But  let  not  the  young  Christian  cease  here. 
The  pulpit  has  need  of  him,  and  indirectly  but  most 
importantly  need  of  her.  The  pulpit  is,  and  must 
remain,  for  many  generations  yet  the  immediate 
voice  of  the  gospel  to  men.  Never  was  the  gospel 


74        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

working  so  mightily  as  it  is  working  in  the  pulpit 
of  our  time.  Yet  it  suffers  tremendously  from  the 
handicap  of  the  pew.  And  here  and  there  it  is 
greatly  helped  by  the  pew,  and  especially  by  the 
pew  where  the  young  Christian  sits,  thinking  the 
best  thought  of  our  time,  eager  to  know  the  best 
that  life  has  to  give,  ready  to  translate  and  trans- 
mit the  message  through  all  the  innumerable  op- 
portunities which  are  open  only  to  youth.  Through 
such  as  these  the  gospel  is  working,  indeed,  in  and 
through  the  church  of  to-day. 

*** 
Quiz 

I.  What  are  the  chief  lines  of  helpful  influence 
on  the  part  of  the  Sunday-school  ?  2.  Mention  some 
marked  contribution  of  the  young  people's  move- 
ment to  modern  religious  life.  3.  What  literary 
service  is  open  to  the  young  people  of  the  church? 
4.  What  is  the  importance  of  the  pulpit  in  modern 
life?  5.  What  constitutes  a  good  hearer? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  What  is  a  "call"  to  the  ministry?  2.  What 
claim,  if  any,  has  the  church  upon  the  minister's 
wife?  3.  What  place  should  be  given  in  the  Sun- 
day-school to  the  results  of  modern  biblical  criti- 
cism ?  4.  Has  the  young  people's  movement  as  such 
passed  its  zenith?  5.  Does  public  criticism  of  the 
churches  do  more  harm  than  good  ? 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  GOSPEL  WORKING  FOR  SOCIAL  BETTERMENT 

THE  most  serious  handicap  upon  the  working  of 
the  gospel  to-day  is  the  fact  that  the  church,  the 
main  medium  of  the  gospel,  belongs  too  exclusively 
to  the  "better  classes."  We  have  gotten  too  far 
away  from  the  "  common  people,"  who  heard  the 
gospel  gladly  from  the  lips  of  the  Carpenter  of 
Nazareth,  whom  we  call  Saviour  and  Lord.  We  are 
as  respectable  to-day  as  the  people  who  crucified 
him  long  ago.  And,  if  the  meaning  of  Christ  is  the 
incarnation  of  God  in  humanity,  there  is  much  more 
danger  than  most  of  us  are  willing  to  allow,  that 
our  respectability  may  mistakenly  crucify  him  again. 
For,  whenever  we  crucify  humanity,  we  do  actually 
crucify  him.  Neither  can  we  despise  and  maltreat 
the  dependent  and  the  defective  classes,  or  refuse 
to  carry  the  burdens  of  "  them  that  are  weak," 
without  refusing  the  "  mind  of  Christ "  and  putting 
him  to  our  treadmill,  or  selling  him  for  silver  once 
more. 

I  walked  in  the  city  of  Washington,  on  the  splen- 
did pavement  between  those  more  splendid  build- 
ings, the  Hall  of  Congress  and  the  Congressional 
Library.  There  passed  between  us  and  the  library 

75 


76        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

a  plain,  two-wheeled  cart,  which  jolted  over  the 
pavement  most  inharmoniously.  In  the  cart  were 
perhaps  a  dozen  Negro  convicts,  dressed  in  dull, 
dirty,  striped  suits  of  dark  gray,  with  sodden  faces 
and  listless  eyes.  They  seemed  utterly  and  absurdly 
out  of  place  there.  Yet,  they  held  my  eyes  and  my 
heart,  and  the  remembrance  of  them  is  keener  than 
all  the  beauty  and  splendor  that  I  saw  that  day.  As 
they  wheeled  sullenly  and  slowly  by,  I  remarked  to 
the  companion  at  my  side,  "  If  Jesus  Christ  were 
here,  he  would  care  more  about  those  dozen  Negro 
convicts  in  that  cart  there  than  he  would  about 
all  the  spectacular  public  buildings  in  this  capital 
city."  And  I  verily  believe  that  beyond  question  I 
spoke  the  truth. 

The  biggest  thing  about  Christianity  is  the  de- 
mocracy of  Jesus,  the  most  absolute  and  uncom- 
promising democracy  the  world  has  ever  seen.  This 
is  the  meaning  of  the  nativity  of  Jesus:  that  when 
God  would  enter  into  humanity,  he  chose  humanity 
shorn  of  all  its  trappings  and  trimmings.  This  is 
the  meaning  of  Nazareth,  and  the  carpenter's  bench. 
This  is  the  meaning  of  the  fishermen  who  followed 
with  him,  and  the  women  toward  whom  Jesus 
showed  no  sex-consciousness,  but  whom  he  treated 
simply  as  souls.  If  the  church  were  as  democratic 
as  Jesus,  she  would  be  crucified  to-day,  and  would 
rise  again  in  all  the  power  of  his  resurrection. 

This  is  preeminently  the  problem  of  our  time,  to 
interpret  the  democracy  of  Jesus  into  terms  of 


The  Gospel  and  Social  Betterment  77 

modern  life.  We  are  afraid  to  do  it  and,  therefore, 
the  church  has  only  half  a  following.  Architecture, 
sculpture,  literature,  painting,  music,  institutions, 
and  laws,  these  things  are  more  to  us  than  men. 
And  until  men,  even  Negro  convicts,  are  more  to 
us  than  all  of  these  we  are  not  more  than  partial 
and  very  imperfect  followers  of  Christ. 

How  are  we  going  to  get  at  it  ?  Not  by  "  mis- 
sions "  and  "  slumming  tours,"  and  "  rummage 
sales  "  for  the  poor,  and  giving  away  our  second- 
hand clothes.  These  things  are  not  altogether  vain 
if  they  are  not  done  in  a  vain  spirit.  But  they  are 
mere  makeshifts  at  the  best.  Even  "  institutional 
churches  "  and  "  social  settlements  "  are  not  sufficient 
to  bridge  the  chasm  between  the  respectable  and  the 
disreputable,  between  the  classes  and  the  masses, 
between  ourselves  and  our  conventional  Christianity 
and  our  Lord  and  Master,  who  was  known  as  "  a 
friend  of  publicans  and  sinners."  In  the  last  analy- 
sis the  problem  is  spiritual,  not  institutional ;  moral, 
not  formal ;  and  its  solution  is  in  the  heart,  and  not 
in  anything  which  head  and  hand  alone  can  do.  It 
is  fortunate  that  this  is  so  because  the  institutional 
church  and  the  social  settlement  are  hardly  prac- 
ticable for  all.  It  costs  money  to  begin  them,  and  it 
costs  a  good  deal  more  money  to  maintain  them. 
And  like  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  their  emphasis  tends 
toward  the  temporal  and  the  physical.  This  is  not 
to  undervalue  their  work.  The  temporal  and  the 
physical  are  with  us,  and  as  in  former  times,  "  fools 


78        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

who  came  to  scoff  remained  to  pray,"  much  more  is 
it  true  that  men  who  come  for  soup  do  sometimes 
get  a  real  inner  salvation,  and  young  men  who  learn 
the  latest  in  athletics  sometimes  learn  that  more 
ancient  wisdom,  that  "  bodily  exercise  is  profitable 
for  a  little,  but  godliness  is  profitable  unto  all  things, 
having  promise  of  the  life  which  now  is,  and  of  that 
which  is  to  come."  But  all  who  have  had  anything 
to  do  with  what  is  commonly  called  institutional 
work,  if  they  have  themselves  any  spiritual  vision 
and  have  entered  into  the  heart  of  the  Christian  ex- 
perience will  confess  that  the  results  of  this  material 
ministry  are  often  profoundly  disappointing  and 
exceedingly  meager  in  genuinely  spiritual  results. 
Institutional  work  is  better  than  a  purely  dogmatic 
work,  and  the  institutional  church  is  richer  in  life 
product  than  many  a  church  which  mistakes  ritual 
or  theological  definition  for  Christianity.  But  this 
type  of  social  betterment  work  is  not  practicable  in 
every  place,  and  if  it  were,  it  would  not  solve  the 
social  problems  of  our  day.  The  solution  lies  in  the 
realm  of  the  spirit,  and  is  not  only  sufficient  to  all 
the  need,  but  it  is  also  open  to  those  who  follow 
Jesus  everywhere. 

"  What  shall  we  do  that  we  might  work  the  works 
of  God?"  asked  the  Jews  of  old.  And  this  was 
Jesus'  own  reply :  "  This  is  the  work  of  God,  that 
ye  believe  on  him  whom  he  hath  sent."  And  this 
is  still  the  answer,  and  it  is  sufficient  to  the  social 
problem  of  our  time.  The  first  great  work  of  the 


"The  Gospel  and  Social  Betterment  79 

church  if  it  is  going  to  "  reach  the  masses  "  is  to  be- 
lieve on  Jesus,  to  catch  his  spirit,  to  share  his  ideal, 
to  live  his  life  among  men,  to  incarnate  human  needs 
and  bear  the  burden  of  human  sorrow  and  suffering 
and  sin  with  him.  Nothing  less  than  this  will  do, 
whether  it  is  ritual,  dogma,  or  institution.  Work 
for  social  betterment  is  first  and  fundamentally  the 
realization  of  social  identity  with  all  our  fellow-men 
through  fellowship  with  the  Son  of  man. 

The  first  thing  a  young  Christian,  or  any  other 
Christian  can  do  to  help  his  fellows  who  are  less 
competent  or  less  comfortable  than  himself,  is  to 
try  to  understand  them.  It  is  easy  enough  to  pat- 
ronize peculiar  activities  of  one  kind  and  another  to 
very  little  profit.  The  fruit  of  this  sort  of  activity 
may  be  only  pharisaic  pride  on  the  one  side,  and  ill- 
concealed  contempt  on  the  other  side.  This  is 
where  many  of  our  "  city  missions  "  fail.  Likewise 
social  betterment  work  is  a  delusion  and  a  snare 
if  it  is  undertaken  in  anything  less  than  a  spirit  of 
absolutely  honest  human  fellowship.  And  if  a  man 
has  an  absolutely  honest  human  fellowship  in  him, 
he  will  find  ways  to  express  it  effectively,  whether 
ordinary  social  betterment  work  is  open  to  him  or 
not.  Let  him  get  right  with  his  fellows  first  of  all 
himself,  then  shall  he  see  clearly  in  what  ways  he 
may  help  them  most  in  his  own  particular  situation 
and  with  his  own  peculiar  gifts. 

We  have  heard  much  about  "  getting  right  with 
God."  No  man  is  right  with  God  who  is  not  right 


8o        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

with  men.  "  If  thou  bring  thy  gift  to  the  altar,  and 
there  rememberest  that  thy  brother  hath  ought 
against  thee:  Leave  there  thy  gift  before  the  altar, 
and  go  thy  way;  first  be  reconciled  to  thy  brother, 
and  then  come  and  offer  thy  gift."  To  paraphrase 
this  saying  of  Jesus  a  little,  "  Get  right  with  men 
if  you  would  get  right  with  God."  No  man  loves 
God  who  hates  his  fellows.  Neither  does  any  man 
honor  God  who  despises  his  fellows.  The  man  who 
rejects  or  contemns  anything  that  is  human,  there- 
by rejects  and  contemns  something  that  is  divine. 
We  measure  our  actual  attitude  toward  God  always 
by  our  actual  attitude  toward  men.  Misunderstand 
men  and  you  misunderstand  God.  Misuse  men  and 
you  misuse  God.  Take  men  lightly  and  you  take 
God  lightly.  The  way  into  the  heart  of  the  eternal 
is  forever  through  the  heart  of  humankind. 

Social  betterment  work  at  the  bottom  is  a  matter 
of  individual  moral  attitude  toward  men.  The  spirit 
of  it,  which  is  always  the  important  thing  about  it, 
is  just  as  much  at  home  in  the  Sunday-school  as  it 
is  in  the  Y.  M.  C.  'A.  It  is  just  as  applicable  to 
the  church  social  as  to  the  soup  kitchen  or  the  social 
settlement  bath.  The  young  people's  society  may  act 
as  a  channel  for  it  just  as  truly  as  a  labor  lecture 
course.  It  will  make  the  pulpit  live  again,  and  will 
go  farther  than  any  amount  of  entertainment  to  fill 
up  the  empty  pews. 

The  biggest  thing  that  any  one  of  us  can  do  for 
social  betterment  is  to  better  our  own  relations  to 


The  Gospel  and  Social  Betterment  81 

our  fellows,  one  and  all.  Begin  at  home  by  working 
out  the  gospel  there  in  the  difficult  role  of  family 
and  neighborhood  intimacies.  Carry  your  zeal  for 
social  betterment  into  Sunday-school  and  young 
people's  society,  and  church,  and  let  it  work  there 
for  the  disintegration  of  all  overemphasis  of  indi- 
vidual rights  and  privileges.  Social  betterment 
would  come  a  great  deal  faster  in  the  world  outside 
if  there  were  less  of  egotism  and  exclusiveness  in 
religious  circles.  A  church  that  is  not  truly  demo- 
cratic is  not  truly  Christian.  The  pomp  and  para- 
phernalia of  Romanism  are  offensive  to  many  of 
us,  since  they  seem  to  contradict  so  glaringly  the 
simplicity  of  the  gospel  of  Christ.  Yet  many  Prot- 
estant churches  are  really  more  exclusive  than 
Rome,  more  provincial,  more  dominated  by  this  or 
that  person  or  clique.  The  largest  service  the 
churches  can  do  to  the  cause  of  social  betterment  is 
first  of  all  to  give  themselves  whole-heartedly  to  the 
democratic  spirit,  to  open  their  doors  to  men  and 
women  without  respect  to  intellectual  or  moral 
caste  lines.  Let  the  churches,  like  the  individual, 
begin  at  home.  Charity  does  not  mean  first  of  all 
almsgiving.  What  it  does  mean  let  the  thirteenth 
chapter  of  First  Corinthians  declare.  This  is  the 
charity  which  properly  begins  at  home.  When  the 
church  recognizes  that  eloquence  and  knowledge 
and  prophecy  and  faith  and  almsgiving  and  even 
martyrdom  for  the  truth's  sake  are  less  than  love, 
and  when  within  her  own  borders  she  shows  forth 


82        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

that  long-suffering,  all-enduring,  and  all-compre- 
hending love  which  the  apostle  so  wonderfully  an- 
alyzes, then  will  her  ministry  for  social  betterment 
be  like  unto  the  ministry  of  Jesus  himself. 

There  is  especial  need  of  the  democracy  of  Jesus, 
the  appreciation  of  man  as  man,  in  all  reformatory 
work.  "  The  Son  of  man  was  revealed  that  he 
might  destroy  the  works  of  the  devil."  And  he  is 
destroying  them  like  "  a  consuming  fire."  But  no 
man  is  quite  fit  to  join  him  in  this  purifying  work 
until  he  has  cleansed  himself  of  pride  and  egotism 
and  the  idea  that  he  belongs  to  some  superior  sort 
of  man.  Temperance  reform  is  a  splendid  work  for 
social  betterment,  and  a  man  can  hardly  identify 
himself  too  positively  with  the  movement  for  a 
sober  city  or  a  sober  State.  But  temperance  work 
is  too  often  touched  with  phariseeism.  It  is  easier 
to  fight  the  rum-seller  than  it  is  to  save  the  rum- 
drinker.  The  strongest  point  that  the  saloons  have 
in  their  fight  against  the  churches  is  that  they  are 
often  vastly  more  democratic.  We  shall  never 
destroy  the  saloon  in  our  great  cities  till  the 
churches  have  made  their  cause  much  more  the 
cause  of  the  common  man,  and  till  the  formalism  of 
religious  worship  is  more  displaced  by  a  healthful, 
hearty,  human  quality  such  as  one  finds  in  a  certain 
crude  way  in  the  ordinary  saloon.  Let  the  young 
Christian  who  goes  into  reform  work  be  very  care- 
ful that  he  does  not  get  away  from  the  large  hu- 
manity of  Christ.  He  ought  to  be  at  least  as  demo- 


The  Gospel  and  Social  Betterment  83 

cratic  as  the  man  in  the  street.    If  he  is  true  to  his 
Master  he  will  be  more  democratic  in  fact. 

Both  the  individual  Christian  and  the  individual 
church  in  whom  this  spirit  of  true  Christian  de- 
mocracy abides,  will  find  a  multitude  of  ways  of 
serving  the  cause  of  social  betterment  in  their  own 
particular  place.  Institutional  features  of  one  kind 
and  another  will  be  found  which  are  adaptable  to 
almost  any  situation.  In  this  respect  much  of  orig- 
inality and  freedom  is  to  be  desired.  We  are  all 
overmuch  prone  to  copy  forms  of  service,  rather 
than  to  seek  the  spirit  and  then  allow  it  to  work 
itself  out  to  fit  our  own  peculiar  opportunities  and 
needs.  The  Emmanuel  Church  found  its  own  work, 
a  work  which  is  practicable  also,  it  may  be  granted, 
in  many  other  places.  It  does  not  follow,  however, 
that  the  same  spirit  in  which  the  Emmanuel  Church 
went  to  work  to  serve  the  poor  and  the  needy  and 
the  suffering  of  Boston  will  work  out  in  the  same 
measures  for  every  country  village  church.  Neither 
can  every  church  be  a  Judson  Memorial  Institu- 
tional Church,  nor  a  Moody's  Institute.  It  is  very 
hard  to  imitate  and  keep  up  first  quality.  Social 
needs  are  so  complex,  social  opportunities  so  mani- 
fold, and  life  is  so  continually  seeking  to  express 
itself  in  new  forms,  that  we  may  well  be  cautious 
lest  we  mistake  some  borrowed  motion  toward 
social  betterment  for  the  one  essential  thing,  the 
spirit  of  a  Christlike  identification  of  ourselves 
with  our  fellow-men.  If  we  love  men  as  Christ 


84        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

loved  them,  we  shall  find  our  own  ways  in  our  own 
time  and  our  own  circumstances  to  make  that  love 
manifest  to  them.  And  if  we  lack  that  love,  all  our 
institutions  and  good  ideas  will  be  very  largely  in 
vain. 

Because  the  social  problem  is  so  emphatically  our 
problem  to-day,  and  because  the  social  spirit  is 
breaking  out  in  a  hundred  different  ways,  it  is  of 
first  importance  that  we  shall  make  no  mistake  here 
as  to  what  is  really  the  first  thing.  Social  better- 
ment does  not  necessarily  mean  that  all  our  churches 
shall  be  institutional  churches  of  the  same  type ;  or, 
indeed,  of  any  recognized  institutional  type.  It  does 
not  necessitate  any  kind  of  uniformity  of  method, 
but  only  a  great  Christian  unity  of  mood.  Let  the 
young  Christian  learn  the  mind  of  Christ;  that  is, 
the  mood  of  Christ  toward  men,  and  let  him  make 
that  mood  his  own  in  relation  to  the  men  and  wo- 
men among  whom  he  lives ;  let  him  use  the  church 
and  the  Sunday-school  and  the  young  people's  so- 
ciety, and  every  other  instrument  and  agency  which 
he  can  influence  to  carry  out  this  mood  toward  men ; 
but  let  him  never  forget  that  the  mind,  the  mood, 
the  living  spirit,  is  the  beginning  and  end  of  it  all. 
Social  betterment  will  not  come  with  anything  less 
than  a  better  social  spirit  on  the  part  of  us  all. 
"  The  kingdom  of  God  is  not  meat  and  drink,  but 
righteousness,  and  peace,  and  joy  in  the  spirit  of 
holiness."  And  this  is  open  to  us  all.  Dream  not 
of  millions  with  which  you  would  endow  this  or 


The  Gospel  and  Social  Betterment  85 

that  good  work.  Nor  yet  of  this  or  that  device  with 
which  you  will  recreate  the  world.  Rather  seek  for 
yourself  that  spirit  which,  if  made  perfect  in  all, 
would  make  all  things  perfect,  and  remember  that 
the  largest  contribution  which  you  or  any  one  else 
can  make  toward  the  betterment  of  men  is  a  heart 
which  is  wholly  one  with  human  sufferings  and 
human  needs  and  the  very  highest  human  ends. 


Quiz 

i.  In  what  way  is  respectability  a  danger  to  the 
church  ?  2.  Was  there  any  sex-consciousness  in  the 
teaching  of  Jesus?  3.  What  is  the  fundamental 
thing  in  social  betterment?  4.  How  is  getting 
right  with  men  related  to  getting  right  with  God? 
5.  What  are  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  general 
"  institutional  "  methods  as  a  part  of  ordinary 
church  work?  6.  What  is  a  real  Christian  de- 
mocracy of  spirit? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  Are  the  churches  respectable  because  they  ap- 
peal most  to  the  respectable  classes,  or  because  re- 
ligion tends,  through  correct  habits  of  life,  to  ma- 
terial well-being?  2.  Does  the  democracy  of  Jesus 
imply  ultimate  social  equality  everywhere?  3.  Is 
almsgiving  on  the  whole  an  evil  or  a  good  ?  4.  Will 
the  Emmanuel  movement  prove  permanent? 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  GOSPEL  WORKING  FOR  KINGDOM  EXPANSION 

No  man  believes  in  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ  who 
believes  in  it  for  himself  alone.  Neither  does  any 
man  believe  in  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ  who  be- 
lieves in  it  for  his  own  city  or  county  or  country 
alone.  The  gospel  that  a  man  holds,  is  for  the 
world,  or  else  it  is  not  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ. 

It  is  true  that  a  man  may  have  the  missionary 
spirit  and  not  have  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ,  or 
have  it,  if  at  all,  in  a  very  imperfect  form.  The 
religion  of  Mohammed  is  a  missionary  faith,  but  it 
is  very  far  from  the  faith  of  Jesus.  There  are  few 
stories  which  are  at  once  so  heroic  and  so  pathetic 
as  Francis  Parkman's  history  of  "  The  Jesuits  in 
North  America."  What  did  they  not  endure  of 
danger  and  hardship  and  suffering  and  cruel 
martyrdom?  And  this  oftentimes  for  the  pitiful 
purpose  of  squeezing  a  few  drops  of  water  out  of  a 
wet  handkerchief  surreptitiously  on  to  the  fever- 
heated  brow  of  a  dying  child,  not  to  cool  its  brow, 
but  to  save  its  soul.  Their  zeal  and  its  immediate 
objective  is  in  curious  contrast  with  the  missionary 
indifference  of  much  modern  liberalism. 

Why  should  a  man  who  believes  in  salvation 
86 


The  Gospel  and  Kingdom  Expansion         87 

through  sacrament  or  through  ecclesiastical  con- 
nection be  so  much  more  in  earnest  for  the  salvation 
of  his  fellows  than  the  man  who  thinks  larger 
thoughts  of  God?  Why  did  the  very  Pharisees 
whom  Jesus  scored  so  unmercifully  for  their  shal- 
low, selfish  faith,  "  compass  sea  and  land  to  make 
one  proselyte "  with  the  ordinary  result  of  such 
unethical  enthusiasm  that  they  made  him  "twofold 
more  the  child  of  hell "  than  themselves,  when  so 
many  to-day  who  hold  the  Christian  faith  in  more 
than  ordinary  purity  are  singularly  indifferent  to 
any  active  propaganda  of  their  principles? 

It  is  well  to  remember  the  strong  saying  of  the 
first  great  missionary  of  Christianity,  to  the  effect 
that  neither  the  faith  that  can  remove  mountains 
nor  the  zeal  by  which  a  man  gives  his  body  to  be 
burned,  is  of  any  large  consequence  without  love. 
Yet,  it  is  perplexing  that  faith  and  zeal  should  so 
often  inspire  men  and  women  to  greater  effort  and 
self-sacrifice  than  love  itself.  Or  is  this  only  ap- 
parently so? 

Whatever  the  explanation  of  this  problem,  it  is 
certain  that  the  love  wherewith  Jesus  himself  loved 
the  world,  inspired  in  him  the  utmost  of  zeal  to 
give  his  doctrine  to  the  world.  He  was  far  removed 
from  the  petty  proselytizing  spirit  of  the  Pharisees, 
but  he  was  also  far  removed  from  the  indolent  indif- 
ference of  a  self-complacent  Christianity.  His  one 
passion  was  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  the  one  su- 
preme end  of  all  his  ministry  was  to  make  that  king- 


88        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

dom  known  to  men.  Nothing  less  than  this  is  ab- 
solutely Christian.  So  far  as  any  man  cares  more 
for  money-getting,  or  any  other  kind  of  getting 
more  than  he  cares  about  getting  men  into  the  king- 
dom of  God,  and  getting  the  kingdom  of  God  into 
men,  he  is  out  of  harmony  with  Christ.  If  his  doc- 
trine interferes  with  the  dissemination  of  the  gos- 
pel of  the  kingdom,  it  is  to  that  extent,  at  least, 
out  of  harmony  with  the  doctrine  of  Jesus.  And,  if 
he  has  less  zeal  than  men  who  have  a  less  intelligent 
faith,  there  is  something  seriously  the  matter  with 
his  faith,  however  superficially  intelligent  it  may 
appear.  A  faith  that  is  not  a  missionary  faith, 
whatever  excellencies  it  may  have,  lacks  a  good  deal 
of  being  the  faith  of  Jesus. 

The  early  church  was  a  missionary  church.  In- 
deed, the  church  has  always  been  a  missionary 
church  when  it  has  been  in  actual  touch  with  the 
spirit  of  Jesus.  The  Reformation  church  was  a 
missionary  church.  So  also  were  the  churches 
which  Methodism  kindled  into  something  like 
apostolic  life.  Whenever  the  spirit  of  Jesus  has 
worked  outside  of  the  churches  in  some  great  en- 
thusiasm for  humanity,  as  in  the  movement  for  the 
overthrow  of  human  slavery,  missionary  zeal  and 
self-sacrifice  have  always  been  manifest.  False 
faiths  and  false  enthusiasms  also  have  their  mis- 
sionary zeal,  it  is  true,  as  weeds  have  their  upspring- 
ing  and  self-asserting  qualities.  But  a  true  faith 
and  hope  can  no  more  be  without  missionary  en- 


The  Gospel  and  Kingdom  Expansion         89 

thusiasm  and  prosper  in  a  world  where  falsehood 
is  to  be  found  on  every  hand,  than  one  may  expect 
a  profitable  harvest  from  a  plant  which  is  with- 
out self-assertive  qualities.  However  excellent  the 
plant  may  be  in  other  respects,  it  will  utterly  fail  in 
the  struggle  for  existence  with  more  aggressive 
and  assertive  forms  of  life.  So  has  every  church 
failed  and  every  movement  which  has  not  had  in  it 
much  of  the  missionary  spirit. 

Jesus  affirmed  in  many  forms  the  expansive  char- 
acter of  his  kingdom.  It  was  to  be  like  the  mustard 
seed  in  the  contrast  between  its  humble  and  ap- 
parently insignificant  beginnings  and  its  later  large 
and  impressive  growth.  It  was  to  be  like  the  leaven 
which  a  woman  took  and  hid  in  three  measures  of 
meal,  a  very  large  quantity  of  flour  from  the  stand- 
point of  individual  need,  or  even  the  need  of  the 
ordinary  family,  and  by  and  by  the  whole  was 
leavened.  The  Great  Commission  is  a  commission 
to  evangelize  the  whole  earth.  The  more  clearly 
the  character  of  Jesus'  teaching  is  understood 
the  more  does  one  perceive  the  truly  universal 
application  of  his  doctrine  and  the  imperative 
mood  in  which  it  stands  toward  all  human- 
kind. To  deny  it  to  any  part  of  the  world  is  to 
deny  the  very  heart  of  the  message  itself,  and  no 
man  who  really  knows  what  the  gospel  is  can  fail 
to  feel  its  inevitably  universal  appeal.  The  strange 
thing  is  not  that  every  Christian  church  which  has 
any  claim  to  the  Christian  name  is  more  or  less 


90        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

missionary  in  its  outlook  and  activities.  Much 
stranger  is  it  that  any  such  church  can  think  itself 
alive  at  all  if  it  does  not  throb  through  and  through 
with  the  passion  to  give  its  gospel  to  the  whole 
earth  as  rapidly  and  as  compellingly  as  it  is  pos- 
sible to  send  forth  the  word.  There  is  more  excuse 
for  the  military  missionism  of  Mohammedanism 
than  there  is  for  the  dead  indifference  of  many  a  so- 
called  Christian  church.  Better  a  pagan  who  thinks 
he  has  something  worth  while  for  the  world  and 
is  mad  with  zeal  to  give  it  to  the  whole  earth  than 
a  "  Christian  "  who  claims  a  faith  which  is  for  all 
ages  and  all  nations,  and  is  too  absorbed  in  himself 
and  his  own  narrow  environment  to  make  any  at- 
tempt to  tell  the  world  his  good  news.  Either  he 
does  not  believe  that  his  "  good  news  "  is  good  for 
much,  or  else  he  is  not  good  for  much  himself. 

The  democracy  of  Jesus  means  more  than  the 
leveling  up  of  classes  to  the  one  vast  fellowship  of 
the  sons  and  daughters  of  God  where  there  can  be 
no  high  and  no  low.  It  means  also,  and  quite  as 
imperiously,  the  passing  of  all  provincialism  and 
lesser  patriotism  into  the  highest  patriotism  of  all, 
the  final  fellowship  of  humankind,  the  universal 
household  of  the  kingdom  of  God.  The  kingdom 
of  heaven  cannot  be  less  expansive  than  this  and 
be  the  kingdom  of  heaven  indeed.  And  no  man  is 
in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  very  far  who  does  not 
long  and  pray  and  work  for  the  day  when  every 
other  man  shall  be  also  there. 


The  Gospel  and  Kingdom  Expansion         91 

Fortunately  ours  is  a  missionary  age.  We  have 
the  opportunity  for  missionary  effort  as  never  in 
the  history  of  the  world  before.  When  William 
Carey  looked  up  from  his  cobbler's  bench  at  the 
map  of  the  world,  a  little  more  than  a  century  ago, 
not  only  were  the  doors  of  many  nations  closed 
to  any  would-be  missionary  of  the  cross,  but  the 
material  means  of  giving  that  gospel  were  nothing 
like  as  adequate  as  they  are  to-day.  Carey  had  the 
printing  press  indeed,  though  printing  itself  was 
crude  and  clumsy  enough  when  compared  with  the 
processes  of  publication  to-day.  And  the  railroad, 
the  telegraph,  the  telephone,  and  a  hundred  other 
devices  which  have  to  do  more  or  less  directly  with 
intercommunication  between  men  and  nations,  were 
yet  to  come.  If  all  this  improvement  in  the  material 
instruments  of  communication  does  not  make  for 
greater  interest  in  telling  to  the  earth  the  story  of 
Jesus  Christ  and  his  message  to  men,  it  can  only 
be  that  we  do  not  think  that  story  and  that  message 
actually  worth  while.  The  young  Christian  who  can 
read  even  the  "  Scientific  American  "  and  not  arise 
from  it  with  enlarged  missionary  interest  and  en- 
thusiasm, has  not  yet  learned  to  make  the  kingdom 
of  God  first  in  his  thoughts. 

Neither  does  any  man  or  woman  appreciate  the 
age  in  which  we  live  in  an  economic  way  who  does 
not  recognize  the  missionary  appeal.  It  is  no  mere 
coincidence  that  modern  machinery  and  modern 
missions  were  born  in  the  same  country  and  about 


92        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

the  same  time.  The  expansion  of  material  produc- 
tion was  bound  to  break  down  the  barriers  between 
nations,  and  necessitate  foreign  markets  as  wide  as 
the  world.  Commerce  would  have  been  clogged 
long  ago  but  for  these  new  channels  for  the  wider 
distribution  of  goods.  *Had  these  channels  been 
opened  without  reference  to  religion,  they  must 
have  been  very  much  narrower  and  shallower,  and 
the  results  must  have  been  mischievous  beyond 
measure,  both  to  the  heathen  and  the  Christian 
world.  They  would  have  been  narrower  and  shal- 
lower because  the  needs  of  men  who  are  barbarian 
are  nothing  like  as  broad  and  deep  as  the  needs  of 
men  who  are  Christian.  The  man  whom  Jesus 
healed  was  seen  sitting  "  clothed  and  in  his  right 
mind."  There  is  a  close  connection  between  a  right 
mind  and  the  demand  for  clothing  and  all  the  other 
good  things  which  make  for  civilization.  And  had 
the  missionaries  of  commerce  been  able  to  create 
some  crude  demand  for  their  manufactures  without 
the  missionaries  of  the  cross  to  go  before  them, 
the  result  to  heathendom  and  civilization  may  be 
measured  in  a  way  by  the  appalling  conditions 
which  prevailed  in  some  of  the  islands  of  the  seas 
where  foreign  seamen  added  the  vices  of  civilization 
to  the  ignorance  and  lawlessness  of  untutored  peo- 
ples. The  world  would  have  been  overwhelmed 
with  a  lava  flow  of  iniquity  which  one  hesitates  to 
more  than  suggest. 

Fortunately  the  missionary  was  first.     The  true 


The  Gospel  and  Kingdom  Expansion         93 

"  advance  agent  of  prosperity,"  as  many  of  our 
big  business  men  are  coming  to  recognize,  is  the 
man  who  makes  men  out  of  barbarians  by  showing 
them  the  way  into  life.  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning 
says  somewhere: 

"  We  must  be  here  to  work, 
And  he  who  works  can  only  work  for  men, 
And  not  to  work  in  vain  must  understand  hu- 
manity 

And  so  work  humanly,  and  raise  men's  bodies 
Still  by  raising  souls,  as  God  did  first." 

This  indeed  is  always  the  divine  method,  to 
"  raise  men's  bodies  still  by  raising  souls."  And 
this  is  missions.  City  missions,  home  missions,  for- 
eign missions,  they  are  all  absolutely  in  line  with 
good  business  sense.  The  young  business  man  who 
does  not  see  this  needs  a  course  in  elementary 
economics.  Whenever  you  raise  men's  bodies,  as 
you  always  do  when  you  actually  raise  their  souls, 
you  do  at  the  same  time  raise  the  demand  for  all 
legitimate  goods.  "  The  stars  in  their  courses 
fought  against  Sisera,"  and  all  the  stars  of  our 
economic  world  are  fighting  against  provincialism 
and  against  barbarism  and  against  heathenism,  and 
for  the  coming  of  that  kingdom  of  God  which,  if 
it  be  not  "  meat  and  drink  "  is,  nevertheless,  on  the 
side  of  "  more  abundant  life,"  even  in  the  things 
which  commerce  supplies. 


94        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

Missionary  interest  is  both  common-sense  religion 
and  common  sense  in  business.  It  is  real  Christi- 
anity, and  it  is  real  modern  enterprise.  We  shall 
neither  hold  our  own  in  faith  nor  in  commerce  if 
we  do  not  give  the  gospel  to  those  who  are  un- 
evangelized.  The  gospel  works  inevitably  toward 
kingdom  expansion.  All  the  commercial  forces  of 
the  day  are  working  also  toward  the  larger  life  of 
men,  which  is  the  ultimate  of  Christian  faith.  The 
first  impulse  of  the  new  convert,  to  tell  his  faith 
abroad,  is  central  in  all  living  Christian  faith.  If 
we  have  gained  in  understanding  of  the  gospel, 
we  shall  have  gained  also  in  the  desire  to  make  it 
known,  for  the  more  one  knows  the  gospel  the 
more  he  sees  how  naturally  and  needfully  it  belongs 
to  all  mankind.  Likewise  every  gain  in  the  demo- 
cratic spirit  makes  for  missionary  interest,  since 
it  includes  all  humanity  in  a  large,  loving  human 
sympathy  which  will  not  be  content  with  anything 
less  than  the  best  for  all  our  fellows.  Modern  busi- 
ness also  is  emphatically  on  the  side  of  missions 
when  it  is  broadly  and  intelligently  viewed.  The 
young  Christian  who  is  enthusiastic  for  missions 
may,  therefore,  know  that  he  is  but  thinking  Christ's 
gospel  in  the  terms  of  Jesus'  own  thinking,  and  is 
one  with  the  profoundest  and  mightiest  movements 
of  our  time,  the  expansion  of  business,  the  expan- 
sion of  the  democratic  spirit,  and  the  expansion  of 
real  religion  in  the  world.  Moreover,  he  can 
justify  his  interest  in  missions  by  the  miracles 


The  Gospel  and  Kingdom  Expansion         95 

which   the    missionary    spirit    has    worked   and   is 
working  in  modern  times. 

*** 
Quiz 

i.  How  do  you  explain  the  missionary  zeal  of 
many  whose  gospel  message  is  most  imperfect?  2. 
Is  a  selfish  or  self-complacent  indifference  to  mis- 
sionary activity  less  mischievous  than  a  blind  and 
intolerant  sectarianism?  3.  What  is  the  economic 
importance  of  missions?  4.  Does  religion  pay  from 
the  standpoint  of  general  commercial  consideration  ? 
5.  What  are  the  missionary  motives  which  modern 
conditions  emphasize? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  Is  there  any  close  connection  between  the  in- 
vention of  machinery  and  the  modern  missionary 
movement?  2.  Has  biblical  criticism  weakened  the 
missionary  impulse?  3.  Is  the  material  or  the 
moral  first  in  the  quickening  of  nations?  4.  Is  the 
enlargement  of  missionary  benevolence  dependent 
in  any  marked  degree  upon  the  correction  of  our 
present  missionary  methods? 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE   GOSPEL'S    MODERN   MIRACLES 

IN  the  "  Missionary  Review  of  the  World "  for 
January,  1897,  there  is  a  brief  article  under  the  cap- 
tion, "  A  Mighty  Miracle."  It  is  the  story  of  a  wo- 
man evangelist  in  India,  Miss  Stevens,  "  Evangel- 
ist Elizabeth,"  and  a  heathen  priest  in  the  vicinity 
of  Madras,  to  whom  she  gave  certain  of  her  tracts, 
after  she  had  prayed  in  his  presence  for  the  blessing 
of  God  upon  them.  He  was  decked  out  in  all  his 
horrid  priestly  gear,  and  was  inwardly  furnished 
with  all  manner  of  clever  argument  against  the 
gospel,  having  the  reputation  of  being  one  of  the 
ablest  dialecticians  in  that  part  of  India.  He  had 
himself  posed  before  the  people  as  a  god,  and  had 
received  homage  as  such.  The  tracts  had  apparently 
only  an  ill  effect  upon  him,  for  a  few  days  after- 
ward he  poured  out  his  abuse  upon  a  native  worker 
because  of  them.  The  preacher -answered  him  never 
a  word,  but  read  to  him  the  first  chapter  of  John, 
and  then,  kneeling,  wrestled  in  prayer  for  him. 
Not  long  afterward  Miss  Stevens  was  astonished 
to  see  this  same  priest  standing  in  her  own  room, 
and  to  hear  him  say,  "Jesus  has  conquered  me." 
He  asked  baptism,  but  was  advised  to  consider  care- 
96 


The  Gospel's  Modern  Miracles  97 

fully  what  the  step  meant  to  him.  Nevertheless  he 
returned,  and  in  such  childlike  spirit  proffered  his 
request  again  that  he  was  received,  the  signs  of  his 
pagan  priesthood  were  removed,  and  he  became  al- 
most immediately  an  effective  preacher  of  the  gos- 
pel which  he  had  despised  and  opposed. 

"  O  Galilean,  thou  hast  conquered,"  are  the 
words  attributed  to  the  apostate  emperor  Julian, 
when  his  effort  to  stay  the  Christian  conquest  of  the 
Roman  Empire  proved  futile.  This  ancient  con- 
quest of  Rome  by  the  early  church  has  been  cited 
often  as  one  of  the  miracles  of  the  ages,  a  kind  of 
crowning  demonstration  of  the  supernatural  origin 
of  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ.  Yet,  in  our  own  day, 
the  conquest  of  heathen  nations  and  peoples  by  this 
same  gospel  has  been  a  no  less  divine  demonstration 
of  the  presence  and  power  of  God  in  and  through 
the  gospel  of  Christ.  The  Hindu  priest's  confession, 
"  Jesus  has  conquered  me,"  is  worthy  to  be  written 
side  by  side  with  the  more  famous  saying  of  the 
unhappy  emperor,  and  there  is  every  reason  to  be- 
lieve that  the  Christian  conquest  of  India  and  heath- 
enism generally  will  be  reckoned  by  the  ages  to 
come  as  no  less  miraculous  than  the  successes  of 
the  gospel  in  the  earliest  centuries  of  missionary 
endeavor. 

The  miracles  of  missions  are  by  no  means  all  the 
miracles  of  our  faith.  There  are  miracles  of  healing 
in  the  name  of  Christ  in  these  modern  days  which 
will  compare  favorably  with  those  recorded  in  any 


98        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

century  since  the  Son  of  man  himself  "  went  about 
doing  good."  Many  of  these  miracles  are  wrought 
by  the  physicians  themselves,  and  with  the  use  of 
the  latest  scientific  appliances.  We  do  the  gospel 
of  Christ  injustice  when  we  exclude  from  the  works 
of  Jesus  all  the  indirect  ministry  of  his  spirit 
whereby  Christian  nations  have  been  quickened  into 
the  better  understanding  of  the  laws  of  God  in  the 
realm  of  the  physical  and  have  learned  to  co-oper- 
ate more  effectively  with  him.  All  that  is  best  in 
modern  civilization  belongs,  in  a  large  way,  to 
those  "  greater  works  than  these "  which  Christ 
promised  that  his  disciples  should  do.  But  mis- 
sions, at  home  and  abroad,  are  a  kind  of  first  fruits 
everywhere  of  the  marvelous  working  of  the  spirit 
of  Christ  among  men. 

Yet  the  miracles  of  missions  are  by  no  means 
confined  to  the  conversion  of  the  heathen  abroad 
and  the  outcast  at  home.  In  many  respects  the 
missionaries  themselves  are  the  supreme  miracle  of 
modern  missions.  Not  since  the  days  of  the  apostles 
has  there  been  a  greater  galaxy  of  splendid  names 
than  the  story  of  modern  missions  affords.  The 
missionary  activity  of  the  church,  quite  apart  from 
its  direct  results  in  the  saving  of  those  to  whom  the 
gospel  has  been  preached,  has  justified  its  cost  many 
fold  by  its  priceless  product  of  heroic  men  and 
women  who  have  written  their  names  with  the 
heroes  of  faith  whom  the  writer  of  the  Hebrews  so 
inspiringly  enumerates. 


The  Gospel's  Modern  Miracles  99 

The  young  Christian  who  does  not  know  some- 
thing of  William  Carey  and  Adoniram  Judson,  of 
Robert  Morrison  and  Alexander  Duff,  of  Robert 
Moffat  and  David  Livingstone,  and  John  Williams 
and  Bishop  Patton,  and  a  host  of  others  before  and 
after  them,  "  of  whom  the  world  was  not  worthy," 
is  almost  as  unpardonable  as  an  aspirant  for  Ameri- 
can military  promotion  who  had  never  heard  of 
Hannibal  and  Alexander,  of  Caesar  and  Charle- 
magne, of  Napoleon  and  Wellington,  or  of  Wash- 
ington, General  Jackson,  and  Ulysses  S.  Grant. 
These  men  themselves,  last  named,  are  the  study 
of  every  man  who  counts  himself  a  soldier  and  seeks 
success  in  arms.  How  shall  our  Christian  youth 
excuse  themselves  for  their  scant  acquaintance  with 
even  the  names  of  those  whose  character  and  career 
is  such  a  mighty  demonstration  of  the  greater  good 
and  more  enduring  glory  of  the  warfare  in  which 
the  followers  of  the  Prince  of  Peace  are  engaged? 

One  need  not  go  away  from  home  for  that  matter 
to  find  these  modern  miracles  in  the  missionaries 
themselves.  Christianity  has  never  done  anything 
greater  in  its  way  than  the  raising  of  Jerry  Mc- 
Cauley  from  the  dead.  This  derelict  of  the  New 
York  slums  was  more  hopeless,  if  possible,  than  the 
heathen  priest  or  any  heathen  outcast.  Yet  the 
work  of  the  gospel  in  him  gave  the  world  a  Chris- 
tian hero  worthy  to  be  compared  for  self-sacrificing 
devotion  and  utmost  love  for  the  fallen  among  his 
fellows  with  the  greatest  of  the  apostles  of  ancient 


ioo      The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

days.  Here  was  a  Christian  athlete  and  wrestler 
with  whose  record  of  immortal  achievement  in  him- 
self and  for  others  every  man  who  aspires  to 
spiritual  stature  and  strength  ought  to  be  thor- 
oughly familiar.  Nevertheless,  Jerry  McCauley  was 
no  more  of  a  miracle  than  was  Dwight  L.  Moody, 
though  Moody  came  not  from  the  slums.  The 
Northfield  lad  who,  without  an  education,  came 
forth  from  that  farmhouse  in  northern  Massachu- 
setts to  electrify  the  world  with  the  power  of  a 
Christ-inspired  personality  and  made  of  his  mustard- 
seed  beginnings  such  a  mighty  tree  of  righteousness 
was  a  veritable  apostle  to  our  times.  And  Mc- 
Cauley and  Moody  are  but  two  of  a  multitude  of 
men  and  women  whose  being  and  doing  in  the  spirit 
of  Christ  make  modern  Christian  biography  such  a 
rich  field  of  holy  inspiration.  Cornelia,  the  mother 
of  the  Gracchi,  is  said  to  have  boasted  of  her  boys, 
"  These  are  my  jewels."  With  much  more  justi- 
fication may  the  church  of  modern  days  point  to 
her  sons  of  strength  who  are  shaping  the  empire 
which  shall  never  pass  away  and  say  of  them,  both 
for  what  they  are  and  for  what  they  have  done, 
"  These  are  my  miracles." 

The  miracles  of  missions  are  manifest,  not  only 
in  the  missionaries  themselves  and  in  their  works, 
but  quite  as  wonderfully  in  the  churches  at  home. 
The  best  answer  to  any  Baptist  objector  to  foreign 
missions  is  the  Baptist  denomination.  One  need 
not  exaggerate  the  weakness  of  our  denomination 


The  Gospel's  Modern  Miracles          101 

before  Judson  came  to  us  out  of  the  bosom  of  New 
England  Congregationalism,  nor  the  relatively 
feeble  growth  of  that  wing  of  our  denomination 
which  rejected  the  call  of  God  in  Judson's  appeal, 
to  prove  beyond  peradventure  of  doubt  that  great 
as  have  been  the  achievements  of  Baptist  mission- 
aries on  the  foreign  field,  the  heathen  have  done 
more  for  us  than  we  have  done  for  them.  Or,  if 
you  like  the  statement  better,  the  reflex  influence  of 
foreign  missionary  effort  has  been  worth  more  to 
the  churches  at  home  than  all  the  cost  of  it  abroad. 
Our  own  denominational  growth,  since  we  heard 
and  heeded  the  call  from  the  Macedonia  of  heathen- 
ism, is  one  of  the  most  mirvelous  results  among  all 
the  marvels  of  missions.  How  any  Baptist,  young 
or  old,  can  be  indifferent  to  foreign  missions  in 
the  face  of  this  practical  demonstration  of  the 
splendid  dividends  which  we  as  a  denomination  have 
received  from  our  reluctant  investment  in  this  for- 
ward march  of  the  faith  passes  all  understanding. 
Yet,  when  have  miracles  ever  convinced  men  against 
their  own  captious  and  covetous  moods? 

This  is  not  a  book  upon  missions,  and  I  do  not 
propose  to  fill  even  this  chapter  with  the  vain  attempt 
to  catalogue  the  conquests  of  modern  missionary  ad- 
vance. The  literature  of  missions  is  abundant,  and 
most  accessible,  and  there  is  needed  for  an  intelligent 
appreciation  of  the  strength  and  success  of  missions 
only  the  willing  mind  and  a  fair  degree  of  appli- 
cation. What  the  writer  of  the  fourth  Gospel  says 


IO2       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

of  the  miracles  of  Jesus  himself  is  exceedingly 
apropos  with  reference  to  the  miracles  wrought  in 
his  name  on  the  mission  fields  at  home  and  abroad : 
"  If  they  should  be  written,  every  one,  I  suppose 
that  even  the  world  itself  could  not  contain  the 
books  that  should  be  written."  But  what  is  writ- 
ten and  what  may  easily  be  read  by  any  young 
Christian  who  will  give  a  very  moderate  amount 
of  time  and  attention  to  these  modern  miracles,  is 
enough  to  prove  again  that  "  Jesus  is  the  Christ," 
and  that  believing  in  him  men  may  still  find  "  life 
through  his  name." 

Read  what  God  has  wrought  in  Africa  since  the 
days  of  Moffat  and  of  Livingstone  there.  Florence 
Nightingale,  herself  one  of  the  finest  products  of 
the  last  century,  whose  sun  still  lingers  in  our  own, 
said  of  David  Livingstone,  that  he  was  the  greatest 
man  of  the  nineteenth  century,  that  century  of  al- 
most countless  mighty  men.  Read  his  story  till  the 
spirit  of  that  Christlike  life  flows  through  all  the 
channels  of  your  own.  Then  read  the  latest  words 
of  Theodore  Roosevelt  concerning  what  missions 
have  done  and  are  doing  in  the  once  "  dark  con- 
tinent "  where  the  glow  of  the  morning  of  a  Chris- 
tian faith  and  life  now  touches  even  the  long- 
sought  sources  of  the  Nile. 

Or  read  the  story  of  China  and  Japan,  and  con- 
sider the  miracle  of  Nippon,  and  the  slower  but 
hardly  less  marvelous  awaking  of  the  vast  "  Celes- 
tial Empire."  Those  who  watched  beside  the  sea 


The  Gospel's  Modern  Miracles  103 

the  feeding  of  the  five  thousand  with  that  handful 
of  bread  and  fish,  long  ago,  saw  a  sight  less  marvel- 
ous than  the  refreshing  of  millions  upon  millions  of 
men  and  women,  and  the  renewal  of  a  whole  nation 
of  nations  through  the  apparently  puerile  efforts 
of  Robert  Morrison  and  his  coadjutors  and  succes- 
sors in  China.  When  Morrison  was  about  to  sail 
for  China,  and  was  settling  the  matter  of  fare  and 
freight  with  a  "  practical "  shipowner,  the  man  of 
business  said  to  the  Christian  argonaut,  who  seemed 
to  him  to  be  going  out  after  a  visionary  "  golden 
fleece,"  "  Now,  Mr.  Morrison,  do  you  really  expect 
that  you  will  make  an  impression  on  the  idolatry 
of  the  Chinese  Empire  ?  "  And  Morrison  answered 
the  smile  which  thinly  veiled  the  practical  man's 
contempt  with  a  dignified  severity  becoming  one  of 
the  prophets  of  Israel,  "  No,  sir ;  but  I  expect  that 
God  will."  Nor  was  the  missionary's  expectation  in 
vain  as  concerns  even  his  own  years.  Morrison,  in 
a  measure,  "  lived  to  see  of  the  fruit  of  his  soul,  and 
was  satisfied." 

In  no  irreverent  spirit  may  it  be  said,  but  with 
utmost  acknowledgment,  that  it  is  the  work  of 
Christ  himself,  and  not  our  own,  that  greater  than 
the  works  which  he  did  when  he  walked  upon  the 
sea  or  stilled  the  storm-tossed  waters  of  Galilee 
have  been  the  works  of  the  missionaries  of  the  cross 
in  the  far  stormier  and  more  uncertain  islands  of  the 
Pacific.  John  Williams'  "  Narratives  of  Missionary 
Enterprise "  have  been  compared  by  an  eminent 


IO4        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

prelate  to  "  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles."  The  mar- 
tyrdom of  Williams  in  the  New  Hebrides  recalls, 
indeed,  the  martyrdom  of  Stephen,  and  the  success 
of  the  gospel  in  the  south  seas  is  as  thrilling  as  the 
story  of  Pentecost. 

And  what  shall  be  said  of  the  marvels  of  mission- 
ary success  which  have  crowned  the  long  waiting 
and  unwearied  labors  of  our  own  missionaries 
among  the  Telugus?  Or  what  of  Mackay  and 
Uganda?  Or  what  of  the  McAll  Mission  in 
France?  Or  what  of  the  transformation  which  is 
going  on  in  the  Philippines,  more  marvelous  than 
when  the  Master  himself  "  manifested  his  glory  "  at 
Cana  in  Galilee  by  turning  the  water  into  wine? 
Is  not  the  whole  story  of  missionary  effort  one  long 
enlargement  of  this  miracle,  the  Lord  of  Life  turn- 
ing the  water  of  our  weak  endeavor  into  the  satis- 
fying draught  which  is  making  the  whole  earth 
jubilant  with  his  joy? 

The  miracle  goes  on  every  day  under  our  very 
eyes,  and  we  are  wondrous  slow  to  see  it  and  quick 
to  forget.  The  apostles  of  Jesus  themselves  saw 
less  of  the  mighty  power  of  the  gospel  than  our 
own  generation  is  beholding.  The  modern  world 
is  one  vast  arena  of  Christian,  effort,  a  thousand- 
fold more  expansive  than  the  arena  at  Rome  where 
weak  women  confounded  the  power  of  the  Caesars 
with  their  overcoming  testimony  for  the  Christ. 
And  again  men  and  women,  even  young  men  and 
maidens,  are  wrestling  with  the  wild  beasts  and 


The  Gospel's  Modern  Miracles  105 

wilder  men,  and  are  overturning  nations  with  their 
message  of  the  undying  Christ.  We  need  not  look 
back  across  the  centuries  for  our  help  and  inspi- 
ration. The  inspiration  is  here.  We  need  not  argue 
about  the  miracles  of  the  past.  The  present  miracle 
is  its  own  witness.  It  is  in  our  own  land,  and 
ought  veritably  to  be  a  part  of  our  own  life. 

*** 
Quiz 

i.  Can  the  word  miracle  be  fairly  used  of  any 
modern  manifestation  of  the  power  of  the  gospel? 
2.  Are  the  works  of  modern  engineers  and  other 
wizards  of  the  material  realm  in  any  sense  wonders 
of  the  gospel?  3.  What  is  the  first  miracle  of  mis- 
sions? 4.  Are  Baptists  indebted  to  missions  in  any 
unusual  degree;  and,  if  so,  where  do  you  find  the 
evidence  of  it?  5.  Are  we  actually  doing  greater 
works  to-day  than  Jesus  did  while  here;  and  if  so 
how  do  you  account  for  it?  6.  How  can  we  make 
the  miracles  of  missions  a  part  of  our  own  life  ? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  Who  was  Robert  Moffat,  and  what  were  his 
relations  with  David  Livingstone?  2.  What  part 
may  be  fairly  claimed  for  missions  as  the  awakener 
of  Japan?  3.  Will  the  Eastern  nations,  as  they  be- 
come more  Christian,  modify  the  forms  of  our 
Western  Christianity  ?  4.  If  so,  what  type  of  heresy 
or  what  lines  of  influence  may  we  most  reasonably 


io6       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

expect?  5.  Have  missions  produced  as  yet  any 
characters  among  the  heathen  themselves  of  really 
heroic  size?  6.  Is  the  pursuit  of  foreign  markets 
making  for  the  Christianizing  of  the  world?  7. 
Who  is  your  favorite  missionary  hero,  and  why? 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  GOSPEL  AND  BUSINESS 

THERE  are  two  words  in  very  common  use  to-day 
which  nowhere  appear  in  the  Bible.  These  words 
are,  employer  and  employee.  Very  much  of  the 
problem  of  Christian  living  centers  about  these 
words  to-day.  They  at  least  suggest  the  wide  dif- 
ference between  the  "  business  "  of  the  Bible  and 
the  "  business  "  of  our  time. 

In  the  Roman  world  of  Jesus'  day,  one-half  of 
the  people  or  more  were  slaves.  Our  word  "  serv- 
ant "  is  the  old  Roman  word  for  slave,  hardly 
changed  at  all  as  to  form.  Paul,  signing  himself  "  a 
servant  of  Jesus  Christ,"  was,  in  fact,  designating 
himself  as  a  slave.  He  returned  the  slave  Onesimus 
to  his  master,  Philemon;  but,  as  he  had  bowed 
himself  to  the  lowliness  of  a  slave  in  relation  to 
Christ,  in  the  same  relationship  he  lifts  Onesimus 
to  the  dignity  of  a  brother  in  the  Lord.  Though 
not  in  form  the  denial  of  slavery,  the  whole  bear- 
ing of  Paul  in  this  matter  was  fundamentally  con- 
trary to  any  and  all  kinds  of  selfish  commercialism 
between  man  and  man. 

In  some  quarters  there  is  much  talk  of  "  wage- 
slavery  "  to-day.  The  ancient  slave  was,  in  some 

107 


io8       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

respects,  undoubtedly  better  off  on  the  side  of  com- 
fort and  security  than  the  less  fortunate  of  modern 
industrial  workers.  He  was  not  in  constant  dread 
of  losing  his  job,  the  nightmare  of  a  multitude  of 
laborers  to-day,  and  not  always  laborers  of  the 
poorer  class  alone.  He  had  no  such  fear  of  the  age 
limit,  as  prevails  widely  among  the  workmen  of  this 
present  strenuous  period  of  keenest  industrial  com- 
petition. And  very  frequently  he  was  better  housed 
and  clothed  and  fed  than  is  the  laborer  of  the  city 
now.  The  modern  workman  has  this  advantage, 
sometimes  a  dubious  advantage  enough  as  it  works 
out  in  practical  life,  that  he  is  technically  his  own 
master.  In  a  great  multitude  of  cases,  it  means 
little  more  than  that  he  is  compelled  to  shift  for 
himself  when  his  profitableness  to  his  employer  has 
passed,  or  some  cheaper  kind  of  labor,  human  or 
mechanical,  is  found  to  take  his  place  and  grind 
out  greater  dividends.  He  is  not  a  workman,  in  the 
sense  of  the  craftsman  periods,  of  skilled  individual 
labor,  nor  yet  a  slave  in  the  sense  that  he  is  any 
man's  property  to  be  cared  for,  with  at  least  the  hu- 
manity with  which  an  average  man  will  care  for  the 
horse  or  dog  that  is  spent  and  outworn.  He  is 
merely  a  "  hand,"  which  is  in  some  ways  the  most 
terrible  term  that  was  ever  used  to  designate  the 
common  soldier  in  the  fearful  battle  for  bread. 

If  modern  industrialism  has  made  the  status  of 
a  multitude  of  workmen  so  hard  that  they  are  in 
a  position  of  very  doubtful  advantage  when  com- 


The  Gospel  and  Business  109 

pared  with  the  better  class  of  slaves  in  ancient 
times,  it  has  made  even  more  difficult,  if  pos- 
sible, the  position  of  many  a  modern  employer. 
If  the  Christian  life  is  next  to  impossible  in  the 
sweatshop  and  the  factories  where  unrestrained 
greed  controls,  it  is  not  less  difficult  in  the  offices 
and  "  counting  rooms  "  where  the  toll  of  such  toil 
is  taken.  Imagine  a  race  between  two  ancient  gal- 
leys, driven  each  by  its  quota  of  whiplashed  galley 
slaves!  It  would  be  hard  enough  for  the  driven 
slaves,  under  such  circumstances,  to  keep  a  Chris- 
tian spirit  with  the  cords  ever  and  anon  biting  their 
all  but  broken  backs.  It  would  be  harder  still  for 
the  man  who  wielded  the  whip  to  maintain  anything 
approaching  personal  fellowship  with  Jesus  Christ 
without  throwing  down  his  whip  and  leaving  the 
ship.  And  to  attempt  this  might  mean  a  seat  for 
himself  on  the  oarsmen's  bench  with  the  slaves, 
and  a  worse  master  with  the  whip  in  hand  over 
both  him  and  them. 

Grant  that  this  illustration  is  severe,  and  does  not 
fairly  represent  average  industrial  conditions  in  our 
modern  world  it  is  nevertheless  but  a  heavily  out- 
lined picture  of  what  prevails  in  many  quarters — 
employee  and  employer  both  alike  driven  by  the 
harsh  necessities  of  business  into  a  situation  where 
real  Christian  living  is  tremendously  and  tragically 
difficult  for  both.  Whatever  the  difficulties  of 
work  on  the  foreign  field,  and  however  great  the 
call  for  heroism  there,  the  difficulties  of  Christian 


no       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

living  at  home  in  the  heart  of  the  market-place  are 
hardly  less,  and  the  demand  for  heroes  and  martyrs 
in  the  business  world  is  as  great  as  it  is  anywhere 
on  earth  to-day.  Neither  shall  we  make  business 
Christian  nor  deliver  our  brethren  from  bondage 
often  fitly  compared  to  that  which  Israel  suffered  in 
Egypt  long  centuries  ago,  until  we  recognize  the 
.severity  of  the  conditions  which  do  actually  prevail 
and  hear  the  voice  of  the  Lord  calling  us  to  serve 
our  less  fortunate  fellows  at  whatever  cost  to  our- 
selves. 

Yet,  there  is  need  of  great  common  sense  in  all  of 
this  matter.  Not  the  hard  "  business  sense,"  which 
denies  or  defends  the  evils,  and  will  hear  nothing  of 
any  proposals  which  make  less  of  immediate  money 
than  of  the  everlasting  rights  of  man.  Such  "  busi- 
ness sense  "  is  not  even  good  business,  as  the  his- 
tory of  every  reform  movement  has  proven;  much 
less  is  it  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ.  The  sense 
that  is  needed  is  the  sense  of  patience  and  kindliness 
and  justice  to  all.  Jesus  was  not  on  the  side  of 
"  class  consciousness,"  and  "  class  consciousness  "  is 
an  exceedingly  dangerous  weapon  to  wield.  Those 
who  take  up  that  sword  are  in  great  peril  of  perish- 
ing by  it.  Neither  was  Jesus  on  the  side  of  imme- 
diate revolution  wherewith  to  establish  the  better 
social  order.  Jesus  spoke  bravely,  and  even  radic- 
ally, on  the  side  of  the  poor.  His  denunciation  of 
social  injustice  was  terrific  at  times.  But  the  inci- 
dent of  wealth  no  more  robbed  a  man  of  Jesus' 


The  Gospel  and  Business  in 

sympathy  than  did  the  incident  of  poverty.  He  had 
as  little  use  for  the  covetousness  of  the  "  have 
nots  "  as  for  the  covetousness  of  the  "  haves."  He 
did  not  measure  materialism  by  the  size  of  its  ac- 
cidental and  objective  desire,  but  rather  by  the 
weight  of  its  moral  displacement  in  the  soul  of  the 
man  himself.  The  sense  that  we  need  is  not  the 
sense  of  material  values,  which  tends,  on  the  one 
side,  to  a  riotous  covetousness,  and  on  the  other 
side  to  an  equally  and  possibly  more  dangerous  re- 
pressive covetousness.  The  sense  that  we  need  is 
spiritual  sense,  the  sense  of  life's  larger  values  and 
man's  deepest  relations  to  the  world  about  him  and 
to  his  fellows.  This  is  as  far  removed  from  the  cold 
calculations  of  the  mere  moneymaker  on  the  one 
hand,  and  the  time-serving  timidity  of  all  those  who 
think  first  of  "  vested  interests,"  as  it  is  from  the 
ravenous  rancor  of  the  appetite-driven  throng.  It 
is  the  sense  of  God  first  of  all,  and  in  the  best  mean- 
ing of  the  words  it  is  also  "  the  sense  of  man." 
This  is  the  preeminent  need  of  every  man  who  is  in 
business  to-day,  whether  he  is  employer  or  em- 
ployee. 

Most  of  current  advice  to  young  people  who  are 
in  the  midst  of  business  life  to-day  is  too  much 
dominated  by  the  philosophy  of  self-help.  There 
is  no  doubt  that  this  philosophy  has  had  its  vic- 
tories, and  victories  which  were  worth  while.  But 
it  does  not  seem  to  have  occurred  to  many  who  are 
at  pains  to  tell  us  that  Jesus  said  nothing  concern- 


ii2       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

ing  the  social  issues  of  his  day — a  very  doubtful 
declaration — that  neither  did  Jesus  expatiate  on  the 
much-lauded  economic  virtues  of  our  time,  industry 
and  thrift  and  enterprise  and  "  getting  on  in  the 
world."  I  do  not  remember  that  he  even  so  much 
as  advised  any  of  the  young  people  of  his  time  to 
"  get  an  education."  This  is  not  to  be  taken  as  im- 
plying any  disparagement  of  education  nor  of  any 
of  the  virtues  mentioned  above.  It  is  good  that 
every  young  Christian  should  get  the  best  educa- 
tion to  be  had.  It  is  good  also  that  every  young 
Christian  cultivate  the  spirit  of  industry  and 
economy  and  enterprise  within  the  limits  of  that 
"  mind  of  Christ "  which  moved  him,  "  though 
rich,"  yet,  "  for  our  sakes,"  to  "  become  poor." 
But  better  than  any  of  these  things,  good  as  they 
are  in  their  place,  and  with  only  a  Christian  em- 
phasis upon  them,  is  the  one  great  thing  which 
Jesus  did  teach,  the  seeking  "  first "  of  that  "  king- 
dom of  God  and  his  righteousness  "  which  is  the 
real  business  of  every  Christian  life.  The  passion 
for  the  kingdom  of  God,  rightly  understood,  is  the 
great  need  of  modern  business  life.  No  man  can 
be  a  Christian  in  business  or  anywhere  else,  though 
he  may  be  a  much  esteemed  moralist  with  a  Chris- 
tian name,  unless  something  of  the  vision  and 
passion  of  the  kingdom  of  God  is  first  in  his  heart. 
A  young  woman,  who  was  an  applicant  for 
church-membership,  was  asked  by  her  pastor  why 
she  believed  herself  a  Christian.  Her  reply,  which 


The  Gospel  and  Business  113 

has  been  much  quoted  and  commended,  was  this: 
"  Because,  sir,  I  sweep  under  the  mats."  And  then 
she  explained  that  before  she  became  a  Christian, 
in  her  work  as  a  servant,  she  had  slighted  her 
sweeping  wherever  it  did  not  show;  but  now  she 
did  it  with  conscientious  thoroughness  as  "  unto 
the  Lord."  Therefore  she  swept  "  under  the  mats." 
It  was  a  good  answer,  and  reminds  one  of  the 
famous  and  familiar  verse  by  the  devout  George 
Herbert : 

"  A  servant  with  this  clause 
Makes  drudgery  divine; 
Who  sweeps  a  room  as  for  Thy  laws 
Makes  that  an  th'  action  fine." 

The  Christian  spirit  certainly  works  for  faithful- 
ness, and  thoroughness,  and  conscientiousness,  and 
all  the  finer  individual  characteristics.  But  it  does 
not  end  here.  The  Christian  in  business  will  be  more 
than  industrious  and  thorough,  and  as  capable  as  it 
is  in  him  to  be  at  his  own  particular  task  whether 
he  would  prefer  that  task  or  not.  He  ought  not 
to  be  satisfied  with  any  lower  ideal  of  individual 
excellence  nor  to  excuse  himself  on  any  plea  for 
being  a  second-rate  workman  as  compared  with  the 
man  of  the  world.  And  he  ought  not  to  be  satis- 
fied with  this  individual  excellence  alone.  He  is 
in  business  to  seek  "  first "  the  kingdom  of  God,  and 
that  kingdom  cannot  be  confined  to  his  own  soul. 

Henry  Havelock  made  a  great  success  of  Chris- 
H 


1 14        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

tian  living,  though  he  lived  it  under  the  radically 
unchristian  conditions  of  militarism.  We  have  had 
other  great  and  good  soldiers  who  have  served  God 
and  man  most  heroically  in  the  camp  and  on  the 
battlefield;  and  this,  notwithstanding  the  fact  that 
better  than  all  warfare  is  the  war  against  war.  So 
also  there  are  great  "  captains  of  industry,"  and 
common  soldiers  not  a  few  who  are  serving  Christ 
splendidly  in  the  camps  of  industry  and  on  the 
sanguinary  fields  of  fiercest  commercial  competi- 
tion. It  is  a  limited  and  qualified  service  in  the  one 
case  as  in  the  other,  but  that  it  is  real  Christian  liv- 
ing can  hardly  be  successfully  denied.  We  are 
coming  more  and  more  to  appreciate  the  limited 
character  of  Christian  living  in  the  midst  of  an 
unchristian  economic  environment.  We  need  more 
than  economic  Havelocks  to  show  forth  the  beauty 
of  Christian  living  in  camp  and  battlefield;  we  need 
our  economic  Tolstoys  to  cry  out  against  the  vast 
wickedness  of  economic  war.  But  we  must  not 
judge  in  the  one  case  more  harshly  than  in  the 
other,  nor  deny  that  even  a  "  Napoleon  of  finance  " 
may  have  some  high  qualities,  and  may,  in  the 
providence  of  God  serve  the  ends  of  that  kingdom 
which  shall  never  pass  away. 

"  Diligent  in  business  "  is  a  very  ancient  exhorta- 
tion; but  there  is  still  place  for  it  in  the  armory  of 
Christian  advice.  War  is  not  only  passing,  but 
even  while  it  lingers  here,  its  conditions  are  being 
modified  by  the  "  Red  Cross  "  and  other  manifesta- 


The  Gospel  and  Business  115 

tions  of  the  spirit  of  Christ.  We  may  believe  that 
Christ  would  not  approve  war,  but  we  cannot  keep 
him  from  the  battlefield  when  men  are  actually 
there.  Neither  can  we  keep  him  out  of  the  stock 
exchange,  nor  away  from  the  railroad  headquarters, 
or  the  factory,  though  these  be  not  to  his  mind.  Let 
us,  by  all  means,  work  for  the  "  new  birth  "  in  the 
business  world,  when  all  our  industrialism  shall  be 
converted  into  a  Christlike  ministry  to  men,  and 
let  us  no  more  despair  of  this  transformation  than 
we  will  of  the  possible  salvation  of  human  indi- 
vidual derelicts  like  Jerry  McCauley,  or  of  religious 
and  political  institutions  apparently  more  hopeless 
than  he.  But  while  we  work  for  this  large  ideal, 
let  us  work  also  every  man  over  against  his  own 
door  and  make  our  own  business  as  Christian  as  it 
may  be  under  whatever  actual  conditions  we  find. 
Let  us  also  "  sweep  under  the  mats  "  and  do  our 
work  as  if  Christ  himself  were  our  employer.  Let 
us  receive  our  employee  as  another  Onesimus,  even 
though  he  has  not  yet  found  his  Paul.  Let  us  be 
"  diligent  in  business,"  but  willing  to  fail  if  thereby 
the  kingdom  of  God  may  the  more  quickly  suc- 
ceed. Despise  not  the  martyrdom  which  none  will 
applaud,  and  which  may  be  reckoned  as  only  in- 
competence or  worse.  Nowhere  in  all  heathendom 
to-day  is  the  opportunity  for  splendid,  self-sacrifi- 
cing service  greater  than  it  is  in  the  apparently  un- 
romantic  and  unheroic  surroundings  of  ordinary 
business  life.  And  when  the  roll  of  martyrs  and 


u6       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

mighty  servants  of  God  is  made  up,  it  will  include 
many  who  were  only  known  as  "  business  men," 
and  very  ordinary  business  men  from  the  stand- 
point of  their  fellows  in  whom  the  vision  of  truth 
and  righteousness  was  dim.  The  best  success  that 
any  man  can  have  in  business  is  to  succeed  in  keep- 
ing himself  clean,  and  kindly,  and  high-minded, 
holding  fast  in  the  midst  of  the  material  his  own 
faith  in  the  things  that  are  unseen  and  eternal,  and 
working  steadfastly  through  the  yielding  of  his  own 
more  immediate  and  impressive  prosperity  for  the 
growth  of  commercial  conditions  which  Christ  him- 
self would  approve.  Nothing  less  than  this  is  busi- 
ness success. 

*** 
Quiz 

I.  What  were  the  industrial  conditions  of  the 
world  in  which  Jesus  had  part  when  upon  earth  ?  2. 
What  is  the  so-called  "  wage  slavery  "  of  our  day  ? 
3.  What  do  you  understand  by  the  philosophy  of 
"  self-help  "  ?  4.  How  do  you  explain  the  silence 
of  Jesus  concerning  industry  and  thrift  and  enter- 
prise and  education  and  like  individual  virtues? 
5.  Who  was  Henry  Havelock,  and  how  did  he  dis- 
tinguish himself?  6.  What  forms  does  martyrdom 
take  in  business  life? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  The  origin  of  slavery.  2.  The  rise  of  modern 
industrialism,  and  the  special  characteristics  of  the 


The  Gospel  and  Business  117 

"  machine  age  "  in  industry.  3.  The  self-help  teach- 
ing of  Samuel  Smiles,  and  its  relation  to  present- 
day  economics.  4.  Christian  living  and  military 
life.  5.  How  much  money  can  a  Christian  properly 
make?  6.  Ideal  business  men. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  GOSPEL  AND  RECREATION 

WHETHER  is  it  easier  to-day  to  live  a  Christian  life 
at  work  or  at  play?  Certainly  it  is  not  easy  to 
make  one's  work  always  measure  up  to  the  high 
standard  of  Jesus.  Many  a  weary  disciple  im- 
agines that  if  he  might  but  change  his  task,  or  bet- 
ter yet,  be  released  from  all  necessity  of  doing  any 
unchosen  task  for  the  sake  of  mere  bread  and  but- 
ter, that  Christian  living  would  be  much  more  prac- 
ticable than  it  is.  But  if  life  were  one  long  holiday, 
and  we  were  wholly  free  to  use  our  time  just  as  we 
would,  the  average  of  Christian  living  would  prob- 
ably fall  rather  than  rise. 

If  there  is  any  need  to  prove  this,  the  lives  of 
the  "  leisure  class  "  afford  abundant  proof.  Here 
and  there  one  is  found  living  for  high  ideals  and 
for  his  fellows  in  some  truly  worthy  way,  but  in  the 
main  those  who  have  nothing  to  do  are  doing 
nothing  that  is  very  much  worth  while.  They  do 
not  seem  to  find  their  much  desired  freedom  a 
stimulus  to  lives  of  devotion.  Nor  may  we  think 
from  the  way  in  which  most  of  us  spend  our  brief 
play  periods  that  playing  more  and  working  less 
would  make  us  better  Christians  than  we  are. 
118 


The  Gospel  and  Recreation  119 

The  little  fellow  who  sat  at  the  table  with  us 
was  just  learning  to  talk.  One  of  his  favorite 
words,  expressive  of  a  great  deal  of  human  nature, 
was,  "  More,  more !  "  He  seldom  said  this  with  re- 
spect to  the  mush  or  any  other  such  prosaic  dish. 
But  he  used  the  word  vociferously  with  respect  to 
the  doughnuts,  to  the  considerable  embarrassment 
of  his  mother,  who  was  afraid  of  more  serious  em- 
barrassment for  him. 

Few  of  us  are  crying  for  more  work,  but  a  great 
many  of  us  are  crying  for  more  play,  with  little 
more  wisdom  than  the  child.  Even  the  churches 
are  compelled  to  make  much  of  entertainment,  and 
the  chief  attraction  of  the  young  people's  movement 
to  many  is  the  "  doughnuts  "  in  prospect,  of  which 
they  never  seem  to  have  enough.  There  is  a  good 
deal  of  spiritual  indigestion  on  the  part  of  those 
who  are  very  young  in  Christian  living,  because 
they  will  have  little  of  plain,  substantial,  blood  and 
muscle  making  food,  and  will  insist  upon  the  cake 
and  candy  and  condiments  of  "  fun  "  and  much  mis- 
called "  recreation." 

Nothing  is  recreation  which  does  not  recreate. 
Some  of  our  play  does  this,  and  is,  therefore,  good 
for  us,  and  not  to  be  condemned.  A  sense  of  humor 
is  almost  indispensable  to  a  well-balanced  character. 
The  man  who  cannot  enjoy  a  laugh  has  not  yet 
entered  into  life.  Play  is  an  instinctive  exercise  of 
youth,  and  as  we  have  discovered  in  these  modern 
days,  has  an  important  physiological  bearing  upon 


120       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

health  and  growth.  Of  play  of  the  right  kind  we 
have  hardly  yet  enough,  despite  the  exaggerated 
emphasis  upon  some  aspects  of  the  play  life.  The 
churches  have  made  too  much  of  entertainment  and 
too  much  of  certain  states  of  more  or  less  abnormal 
excitement,  but  they  have  seldom  made  enough  of 
all-around  wholesome  enjoyment.  Goodness  and 
gladness  have  much  more  than  an  alliterative  af- 
finity for  each  other.  "  Restore  unto  me  the  joy 
of  thy  salvation,  .  .  then  will  I  teach  transgressors 
thy  ways  "  was  the  prayer  of  a  man  who  judged 
rightly  that  spiritual  life  and  health  and  spiritual 
usefulness  are  also  related  to  joy  and  play. 

The  artists  are  largely  responsible  for  our  over- 
emphasis upon  the  melancholy  of  Jesus.  He  was 
undoubtedly  "  a  man  of  sorrows,  and  acquainted 
with  grief,"  but  this  might  also  be  said  of  some  of 
our  modern  humorists  who  have  ministered  of 
mirth  to  others  while  walking  in  a  Gethsemane. 
Jesus  was  not  a  humorist.  Neither  does  he  make 
the  use  that  Paul  made  of  the  games  and  sports  of 
his  time  to  illustrate  Christian  activity  and  excel- 
lence. Certainly  there  was  no  slightest  touch  of 
frivolity  in  him,  and  on  the  surface  of  the  records 
there  is  little  appearance  of  play.  But  the  fact  that 
his  father  and  mother  could  go  a  day's  journey 
without  missing  him,  so  as  to  be  at  all  concerned 
about  him,  supposing  him  to  be  somewhere  in  the 
caravan,  indicates  that  as  a  boy  of  twelve  he  was 
no  unnatural  prig,  but  a  healthy,  hearty,  happy 


The  Gospel  and  Recreation  121 

child.  And  the  further  fact  that  they  sought  him 
for  three  days  before  it  seems  to  have  occurred 
to  them  to  look  for  him  in  the  temple,  together  with 
his  own  mature  insistence  upon  the  naturalness  of 
his  whole  attitude  toward  his  Father  in  heaven, 
speaks  also  for  a  lad  who  was  wholly  and  most  joy- 
fully alive.  There  are  traces  of  keenest  humor  here 
and  there  in  his  teaching,  as  when  he  exaggerated 
concerning  the  "  beam "  in  the  critic's  own  eye. 
Much  of  his  argument  against  the  Pharisees  was 
ridicule,  cutting  indeed,  but  more  mirth-provoking 
by  far  to  his  contemporaries  than  it  appears  to  us. 
And  in  his  great  eulogy  of  John  the  Baptist,  the 
apostle  of  seriousness  in  religion,  Jesus  refers  to 
the  play  of  the  children  in  the  streets,  playing 
funeral  and  playing  weddings,  and  compares  him- 
self and  his  ministry  to  the  martial  procession  with 
its  dance  and  song.  Indeed,  his  enemies  called 
him,  according  to  his  own  confession,  "  a  wine- 
bibber  and  a  glutton,"  as  compared  with  the  ab- 
stemious recluse  who  shunned  the  social  and  festive 
board.  Jesus  was  not  only  very  much  a  man  among 
men,  but  there  is  every  reason  to  believe  that  "  noth- 
ing that  is  human  "  was  "  foreign  "  to  him.  And 
mirth  and  play  belong  to  normal  and  healthy  life. 
Christians  have  just  as  much  right  to  all  manner 
of  reasonable  and  helpful  recreation  as  other  men. 
That  they  may  forego  their  rights  in  the  interests 
of  a  Christian  expediency  with  regard  to  their  own 
peculiar  opportunities  and  responsibilities  to  others 


122       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

is  also  true,  and  a  truth  of  very  great  consequence, 
requiring  much  Christian  common  sense  to  apply. 
But  nothing  is  wrong  in  and  of  itself  for  a  Chris- 
tian which  is  not  also  wrong  for  others.  Church- 
membership  and  Christian  profession  do  not  create 
a  special  moral  code.  Every  man,  whether  he  con- 
fesses faith  in  Christ  or  not,  or  whether  he  denies 
or  affirms  Christian  obligation  is,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  bound  to  acknowledge  God's  first  claim  upon 
his  life.  It  is  mischievous  to  admit  even  by  impli- 
cation that  a  man  can  escape  his  responsibility  to 
be  all  that  he  can  be  for  himself  and  the  world. 
Every  man's  life  is  a  stewardship  whether  he  will 
or  not.  Ignoring  the  fact  does  not  cancel  the  obli- 
gation, or  make  less  serious  his  failure  to  live  up 
to  his  opportunity.  No  man  has  any  more  right  to 
throw  himself  away  than  has  any  other  man.  Every 
man  will  be  held  responsible  for  all  that  he  might 
have  been  and  done  in  and  for  the  kingdom  of  God. 
"  I  would  like  to  join  the  church,  and  I  know 
I  ought  to  live  a  Christian  life,  but  I  dearly  love  to 
dance,  and  I  do  not  think  that  a  Christian  ought  to 
dance,"  said  a  young  woman  to  me  some  years  ago. 
I  had  not  raised  the  question  of  dancing  at  all,  and 
had  no  desire  to  do  so.  Get  a  man  or  woman  right 
on  fundamentals  and  incidentals  will  take  care  of 
themselves.  We  have  made  and  do  make  alto- 
gether too  much  of  dancing,  and  card-playing,  and 
theatergoing,  and  all  that  kind  of  incidental  in  so 
far  as  we  have  allowed  these  things  to  obscure  the 


The  Gospel  and  Recreation  123 

real  issue,  the  question  of  questions,  the  conscious 
dedication  of  a  man's  heart  and  life  to  God  as  the 
one  thing  without  which  everything  else  is  vain. 
The  fact  is  that  feeling  as  she  did  that  dancing  was 
contrary  to  the  highest  type  of  living,  that  young 
woman  had  no  more  right  to  dance  outside  of  the 
church  than  in  it.  She  was  bound,  as  every  other 
woman  is  bound,  to  act  up  to  her  best  vision  of 
achievement  for  herself  and  usefulness  toward 
others.  I  am  not  saying  that  dancing  is  wrong. 
Neither  am  I  saying  that  it  is  right.  I  refuse  to 
be  side-tracked  from  the  main  issue.  The  fact  is 
that  you  belong  to  God.  All  that  you  are,  and  all 
that  you  can  do  is  his,  for  his  kingdom.  Your  own 
happiness  is  bound  up  with  this  divine  intention  in 
you  and  for  you.  To  defeat  it  is  to  defeat  yourself. 
To  trifle  with  it  is  to  trifle  with  yourself.  God 
wants  nothing  of  you  but  what  is  best  for  you. 
Whatever  is  consistent  with  this  is  yours,  and  no 
church  can  take  it  away  from  you.  Neither  can 
anybody  give  you  what  is  not  yours,  what  is  con- 
trary to  your  whole  being's  aim  and  end.  It  is  just 
as  wrong  for  me  to  eat  poison  whether  I  am  a  mem- 
ber of  a  pure  food  club  or  not.  The  wrong  is  in  the 
injury  it  does  me,  and  through  me  the  society  to 
which  I  belong.  No  one  has  the  right  of  suicide 
in  whole  or  in  part,  except  as  he  lays  down  his  life 
for  the  world.  Neither  has  any  one  the  right  of 
moral  suicide,  either  to  the  extent  of  refusing  moral 
obligation  and  service  altogether  or  of  refusing  it 


124       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

with  reference  to  any  act  or  feature  of  his  life.  A 
man  has  no  more  right  to  cut  his  ear  off  than  he 
has  to  cut  his  head  off.  Neither  has  a  man  a  right 
to  cut  off  one  part  of  his  life  and  mutilate  himself 
with  reference  to  the  end  for  which  he  is  alive. 
And  that  end,  whether  he  knows  it  and  recognizes 
it  or  not,  is  to  do  God's  will. 

We  shall  never  settle  this  question  of  amusements 
and  entertainment  by  discussing  in  detail  this  or 
that  petty  piece  of  self-indulgence.  We  must  get 
back  to  first  principles  or  we  shall  never  get  for- 
ward toward  perfection.  Whatever  makes  you 
more  of  a  man,  or  a  woman,  is  right  for  you,  and 
nothing  is  right  which  makes  you  less.  The  appli- 
cation of  this  principle  you  will  have  to  settle  for 
yourself.  If  you  settle  it  dishonestly  by  any  kind 
of  subterfuge  or  evasion,  you  will  suffer  the  loss 
in  yourself.  If  you  exclude  anything  which  you 
might  fairly  include,  you  are  that  much  the  poorer, 
unless  your  exclusion  has  worked  some  larger  gain. 
If  you  include  what  in  all  simplicity  and  unselfish- 
ness you  ought  to  have  excluded,  you  are  as  bound 
to  pay  the  price  as  if  you  had  taken  hurtful  food 
into  your  body.  God  is  not  whimsical.  He  works 
through  law,  and  always  his  law  is  working, 
whether  we  wisely  work  with  it  or  try  to  get  the 
better  of  it.  We  never  do  get  "  the  better  "  of  it, 
but  always  the  worse  when  we  are  out  of  harmony 
with  his  purposes  for  us. 

A  glass  of  wine  is  wrong,  not  because  the  man 


The  Gospel  and  Recreation  125 

who  drinks  it  is  a  church-member  or  a  minister, 
though  it  may  be  granted  that  these  considerations 
might  enter  into  the  mischievous  influence  of  this 
or  that  man's  indulgence  in  wine-drinking.  But  the 
primary  evil  of  it  is  the  mischief  it  does  the  man 
himself,  and  the  tendency  of  the  habit  to  make  or 
mar  his  usefulness  toward  others.  If  wrong  at 
all  it  is  wrong  because  indulgence  in  wine-drinking 
makes  a  man  less  a  man  in  relation  to  the  kingdom 
of  God.  Judged  by  the  same  standard  a  cup  of 
coffee  may  be  wrong,  though  taken  at  a  church  so- 
cial ;  it  may  lessen  a  man's  value  to  himself  and  to 
society.  There  is  a  vast  amount  of  very  dubious 
devotion  to  late  refreshments  in  our  churches,  and 
much  harm  to  clean  living  and  high  thinking  by 
reason  of  the  animalism  which  prevails  at  many  a 
religious  feast.  The  churches  have  a  long  way  to 
go  yet  to  set  the  world  a  worthy  example  of  real 
temperance — that  is,  real  self-control  with  respect 
to  appetite. 

The  young  Christian  may  permit  himself  any 
amount  of  play  and  any  kind  of  play  which  con- 
tributes to  his  manhood.  He  ought  to  deny  himself 
any  sport  or  "  refreshment "  or  enjoyment  which 
makes  him  less  a  man.  Whatever  subtracts  from 
his  self-respect  is  wrong  for  him,  however  innocent 
it  may  be  in  itself.  Any  indulgence  which  injures 
his  influence  for  good  is  too  expensive  for  him, 
though  he  have  a  "  season  ticket "  free.  With  re- 
gard to  self-respect,  he  ought  to  study  for  a  large 


126        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

view  of  his  own  manhood.  With  regard  to  his  in- 
fluence he  ought  to  study  for  a  large  view  of  the 
manhood  of  others,  their  ultimate  and  not  only 
their  immediate  welfare.  In  both  of  these  estimates 
he  needs  to  be  guided  again  by  first  principles,  the 
desire  to  advance  the  kingdom  of  God  in  others 
and  not  only  to  win  them  for  this  or  that  institution 
or  system  of  thought,  and  for  himself  the  determi- 
nation to  be  a  Christlike  man,  and  not  merely  an  ac- 
ceptable church  man.  Only  let  his  ideal  of  Christ  be 
wholesome  and  actually  Christian,  and  not  a  weak, 
modern  imitation  of  some  medieval  ideal.  Then 
may  he  laugh  as  heartily  as  any  on  occasion,  or  take 
his  place  on  the  athletic  field,  or  join  in  games 
a-plenty,  or  indulge  with  moderation  in  late  refresh- 
ments, or  enter  into  the  vacation  season  with  all  the 
enthusiasm  of  the  most  devoted  lover  of  fishing 
and  hunting  and  the  study  of  nature,  with  only  one 
sensible  check  to  hold  his  head  up  lest  he  stumble, 
the  thought  that  he  must  be  always  and  everywhere 
a  clean  and  conscientious  man,  playing  and  working 
alike,  "  as  in  his  great  Taskmaster's  eye." 

A  Christian  may  do  anything,  at  any  time,  and 
in  any  company  which  will  forward  the  interests  of 
the  kingdom  of  God.  And  those  interests  are  as 
wide  as  all  wholesome  life.  He  may  do  nothing 
legitimately  under  any  kind  of  dispensation  which 
will  harm  himself  or  others.  This  applies  to  his 
business  as  much  as  to  his  recreation.  It  applies  to 
his  recreation  as  much  as  to  his  business.  It  is 


The  Gospel  and  Recreation  127 

hard  to  weep  unselfishly,  and  sorrow  like  a  Christian. 
It  is  harder  yet  to  laugh  always  as  a  Christian 
should.  Nowhere  to-day  is  there  greater  need  of 
conscience  and  common  sense  than  with  respect  to 
recreation.  Much  of  it  is  dissipation,  and  some  of 
it  is  very  mischievous  dissipation  in  religious  guise. 
None  of  it  is  good  or  right,  for  the  Christian  or  for 
anybody  else,  which  does  not  make  the  world  better 
in  some  way  or  other,  in  greater  or  less  degree. 
Go  where  you  please  so  that  you  can  take  the  inter- 
ests of  the  kingdom  of  God  with  you,  and  play  as 
you  please,  so  that  your  play  does  not  undo  any  of 
the  good  work  of  the  world.  Only  remember  that 
working  or  playing  we  are  always  His. 

*** 
Quiz 

I.  Is  Christian  living  more  difficult  with  refer- 
ence to  business  or  recreation  to-day?  2.  What  can 
be  said  for  humor  and  play  as  features  of  Christian 
character  and  life  ?  Is  there  any  evidence  of  humor 
in  Jesus?  3.  Is  a  church-member  under  more  obli- 
gation to  live  soberly  and  earnestly  than  other  men 
or  women?  4.  On  what  principle  shall  we  deter- 
mine our  rights  and  duties  with  reference  to  the  so- 
called  doubtful  amusements? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

I.  Relative  religiousness  of  the  leisure  class  now 
and  in  former  times,  is  it  greater  or  less,  and  what 


128        The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

are  the  causes  ?  2.  The  use  of  the  games  and  sports 
of  apostolic  times  by  the  Apostle  Paul  in  the  illustra- 
tion of  Christian  truth.  3.  The  sports  of  the  ancient 
world  and  modern  athletics  and  amusements  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  gospel  type  of  life.  4.  Has 
the  church  made  too  much  or  too  little  of  absti- 
nence from  the  theater  and  the  dance?  5.  What  is 
a  Christian  attitude  toward  present-day  college  ath- 
letics? 6.  Is  ours  a  frivolous  age? 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE   GOSPEL   AND    HOME-MAKING 

HERE  and  there  a  novelist  is  found  with  the  courage 
to  begin  the  story  where  romances  in  books  com- 
monly end,  when  the  proposal  is  made  and  the  wed- 
ding is  fairly  in  sight.  But  this  is  a  very  daring 
proceeding,  indeed,  as  daring  as  it  is  unusual,  for 
who  will  wish  to  amend  the  ancient  and  honorable 
ending  of  all  "  good "  stories,  "  and  they  lived 
happily  ever  after  "  ? 

Whether  we  wish  an  amendment  or  not,  life 
mocks  our  sentimental  optimism,  and  insists  that 
the  wedding  is  not  the  climax  which  the  story 
books  pretend,  but  is  rather  the  beginning  of  love's 
serious  narrative.  If  we  thought  of  marriage  more 
as  a  beginning  and  less  as  a  finality,  it  would, 
in  a  multitude  of  cases,  prove  much  more  final 
than  it  is. 

The  divorce  problem  is  one  of  the  largest  prob- 
lems of  our  day.  Much  is  written  concerning  it 
that  is  wise  and  strong.  But  there  is  great  need  of 
recognizing  more  that  the  root  of  the  divorce  evil 
is  farther  back  than  many  of  us  go.  Easy  divorce 
comes  of  easy  marriage,  and  the  frequency  of  di- 
vorce is  to  a  much  greater  extent  than  most  of  us 
i  129 


130       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

admit,  the  result  of  false  thinking  and  foolish  acting 
with  regard  to  courtship  and  marriage. 

Men  and  women  will  never  stay  married  until 
they  get  married  with  more  sense  than  most  of 
them  show  to-day.  The  wonder  is  not  that  divorce 
is  common,  and  that  efforts  to  prevent  it  in  a  legal 
way  are  so  often  abortive.  The  much  greater 
wonder  is  that  divorce  is  not  vastly  more  common 
than  it  is,  and  that  so  little  of  marital  misery  gets 
aired  out  in  the  courts.  Not  but  that  there  are 
many  happy  marriages,  for  undoubtedly  there  are. 
As  Mr.  Dooley  very  shrewdly  remarked,  "  Doin* 
good  ain't  news."  And  "  bein'  good  ain't  news  " 
either.  One  unhappy  marriage  will  attract  more 
public  attention  than  ten  happy  unions.  But  that 
there  are  so  many  happy  unions  is  much  more  due 
to  the  grace  of  God  than  it  is  to  the  good  sense  of 
the  average  young  man  or  young  woman  who  is 
seeking  a  life  companion.  And  the  amount  of  good 
sense  actually  shown  by  the  average  man  and  wo- 
man after  marriage  is  out  of  all  proportion  to  the 
very  modest  amount  commonly  exercised  before. 
Nearly  every  man  who  is  happily  married  will  ad- 
mit in  his  more  candid  moments  that  he  owes  it 
more  to  the  preventing  providence  of  God  than  he 
does  to  his  own  wisdom  and  judgment. 

Most  young  people,  even  Christian  young  people, 
look  upon  marriage  as  a  good  deal  of  a  joke. 
There  is  much  to  encourage  this  most  mischievous 
view  in  the  popular  attitude  toward  married  life. 


The  Gospel  and  Home-Making  131 

More  jokes  are  cracked  at  the  expense  of  marriage 
than  on  any  other  theme.  Witticism  and  cynicism 
flourish  everywhere  in  the  funny  columns  of  the 
newspapers  and  in  familiar  conversation  whenever 
courtship  and  marriage  and  divorce  are  to  the 
front.  Husbands  and  wives  who  are  sincerely  fond 
of  each  other  often  cover  their  real  affection  by 
cheap  cynicisms  and  insulting  witticisms  in  the 
presence  of  other  people.  This  whole  attitude 
toward  marriage  is  nothing  less  than  wicked,  and 
has  very  much  to  do  with  the  appalling  decadence 
of  happy  and  wholesome  family  life  among  us. 
There  is  no  finer  field  for  the  exercise  of  Christian 
good  sense  and  for  insistence  upon  the  mind  of 
Christ  to-day  than  in  the  domain  of  ordinary  con- 
versation and  conduct  with  respect  to  love  and  mar- 
riage. Every  Christian  ought  to  set  his  face  against 
this  fatal  facetiousness,  and  ought  to  do  his  utmost 
to  raise  every  reference  to  the  marriage  relation  in 
his  presence  and  all  his  own  thinking  concerning  it 
to  the  high  level  of  decency  and  seriousness  and 
reverential  regard.  For,  if  there  is  anything  serious 
in  this  world  of  ours  and  anything  sacred  in  human 
relationships,  courtship  and  marriage  and  family 
life  belong  to  the  very  innermost  court  of  the 
temple,  and  ought  not  to  be  profaned  by  the  foot- 
ball play  of  careless  feet.  I  question  whether  the  un- 
clean talk  of  many  men  concerning  the  marriage  re- 
lation does  as  much  harm  as  the  cheap  witticisms 
and  cynical  slurs  upon  marriage  which  are  so  com- 


132       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

mon  with  better  people,  and  the  moonshine  of  senti- 
ment through  which  the  whole  matter  is  viewed  by 
the  great  majority  of  the  youth  of  our  day. 

Apart  from  direct  dedication  of  one's  self  to  the 
immediate  service  of  the  kingdom  of  God  among 
men,  home-making  is  the  biggest  business  in  which 
any  man  and  woman  can  engage.  It  has  more  to 
do  with  individual  happiness  and  ordinarily  more  to 
do  with  social  usefulness  than  any  other  relation 
of  life.  A  prominent  railroad  manager  called  the 
attention  of  a  friend  who  was  riding  with  him  to  the 
quick  whistle  of  the  engine  as  they  passed  a  certain 
farmhouse  standing  back  from  the  road.  At  the 
same  time  a  woman  appeared  at  the  door  and  waved 
her  apron  above  her  head.  "  That  is  the  engineer's 
wife,"  remarked  the  railroad  manager.  "  He  al- 
ways salutes  her  when  his  run  brings  him  past  his 
home,  and  she  always  returns  the  salute."  And 
then,  he  added  thoughtfully,  "  I  like  it.  I  have 
noticed  that  a  happy  home  life  is  back  of  nearly 
every  first-class  workman.  A  man  who  has  a  good 
home  life  is  worth  more  to  his  employer." 

And  though  every  man  who  has  a  good  wife  may 
well  confess  that  she  is  "  from  the  Lord,"  and  justly 
attribute  much  of  his  fortune  to  the  guiding  good- 
ness of  God,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  the  exercise 
of  good  hard  common  sense  brings  nowhere  surer 
and  larger  returns  than  it  does  when  exercised  with 
regard  to  getting  and  guiding  a  home.  For,  in  this 
matter,  quite  as  certainly  as  with  respect  to  any 


The  Gospel  and  Home-Making  133 

work  of  a  man's  life,  it  is  preeminently  true  that 
"  God  helps  those  who  help  themselves." 

Generally  speaking,  it  is  better  to  marry  than  not 
to  marry.  The  solitary  life  tends  to  selfishness, 
unless  it  is  devoted  to  some  large  social  service,  or 
is  saved  by  some  exceptional  devotion  to  other 
family  relationships.  Very  seldom  should  these 
other  family  relationships  be  allowed  to  stand  be- 
tween a  young  man  and  woman  who  are  wisely 
mated,  except  in  a  temporary  way.  Parents  are 
sometimes  painfully  short-sighted  in  requiring  of 
their  children  the  sacrifice  of  their  own  happiness 
and  welfare  for  a  less  duty  at  home.  I  have 
known  a  father,  and  a  prominent  Christian  man  at 
that,  to  sacrifice  all  the  future  of  his  daughter  for 
the  sake  of  a  passing  emergency  in  the  home  when 
he  himself  allowed  his  own  desire  for  a  second 
union  to  set  aside  his  own  first  responsibilty  to  the 
younger  children  of  his  first  wife.  There  is  need 
on  all  sides  of  real  and  rare  unselfishness  in  such 
situations,  and  neither  a  young  man  nor  a  young 
woman  ought  to  be  in  such  haste  to  satisfy  senti- 
mental impatience  as  to  disregard  the  reasonable 
demands  upon  them  of  the  home  from  which  they 
come.  But  the  right  to  marry  and  to  have  a  home 
of  their  own  belongs  to  all  young  people  at  a  rea- 
sonable age,  and  there  is  much  self-sacrifice  which  is 
neither  good  for  those  who  offer  it  nor  yet  for  those 
who  receive  it.  The  right  to  live  one's  own  life  in 
the  world  is  usually  more  than  a  right ;  it  is  a  duty, 


134       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

and  it  is  too  often  set  aside  for  some  smaller  good. 
Even  the  Master  specifically  allowed  that  "  for  this 
cause,"  because  "  it  is  not  good  for  man  to  be 
alone  "  and  man  and  woman  were  made  "  in  the 
beginning  "  for  each  other,  "  for  this  cause  shall  a 
man  leave  his  father  and  mother  and  cleave  to  his 
wife."  The  home  instinct  is  born  of  God,  and  ought 
not  to  be  lightly  set  aside  by  any  man.  But  it  is 
better  not  to  marry  than  to  marry  wrong.  "  Mar- 
riage to  a  good  woman,"  says  the  old  proverb,  "  is 
a  harbor  in  the  tempest;  to  a  bad  woman  it  is  a 
tempest  in  the  harbor."  And  it  is  worse,  if  pos- 
sible, for  the  woman  who  is  wedded  to  a  bad  man, 
for  the  man  unfortunately  married  spends  relatively 
much  less  time  in  his  "  harbor  "  than  the  woman 
must  needs  spend.  His  home  life  is  much  to  him, 
but  her  home  life  is  more  to  her,  and  the  better 
woman  she  is,  the  more  it  is  likely  to  be.  Better  a 
parrot  and  a  kitten  for  her  sole  companions  in  old 
age  than  a  lifelong  bondage  to  a  fool  or  a  brute  in 
the  guise  of  a  man.  If  women  were  less  eager  to 
marry,  many  of  them  would  marry  much  more 
wisely  than  they  do. 

A  man  who  married  twice,  and  married  well  in 
both  instances,  gave  this  glimpse  afterward  of  his 
heart  experience.  "  I  prayed  for  the  wife  of  my 
youth  before  I  ever  met  her.  Perhaps  it  was 
visionary  from  the  standpoint  of  some,  but  I  rea- 
soned it  out  after  this  fashion:  In  our  home,  al- 
though there  was  much  merriment  and  frequent 


The  Gospel  and  Home-Making  135 

joking,  we  were  none  of  us  allowed  to  tell  any 
story  or  make  any  remark  which  reflected  un- 
favorably upon  marriage.  Father  simply  would  not 
have  it.  I  grew  up  with  the  conviction  that  mar- 
riage was  the  right  and  reasonable  thing  for  every 
normal  man,  and  that  it  was  a  matter  of  utmost 
consequence.  One  day  it  came  over  me  that  if  I 
ever  married,  the  woman  I  would  marry  was  doubt- 
less alive  somewhere,  and  forming  her  character, 
as  I  was  forming  mine.  I  was  about  seventeen, 
but  as  I  had  dedicated  myself  to  a  considerable 
course  of  study,  and  did  not  mean  to  marry  till  that 
course  was  finished,  I  had  no  idea  who  the  woman 
might  be.  But  I  remember  distinctly  carrying  the 
matter  to  God  in  prayer,  as  I  carried  all  the  affairs 
of  my  life,  and  asking  that  God  would  bless  her 
and  have  her  in  his  keeping  and  make  me  worthy  of 
her.  I  met  her  a  year  or  two  afterward,  though  it 
was  not  for  years  after  that  we  married,  but  I  have 
always  felt  that  the  happiness  of  the  twice  seven 
years  we  walked  together  began  with  that  boyish 
prayer  before  I  so  much  as  knew  her  name.  And 
when  she  had  been  in  heaven  for  years,  and  I  chose 
again,  I  chose  with  the  same  sense  of  a  divine  fel- 
lowship upon  me.  I  have  never  done  anything  in 
my  life  which  I  measured  more  carefully,  or  which 
was  to  me  in  the  very  act  more  utterly  an  act  of 
religious  devotion  than  when  God  called  me  to 
choose  a  woman  to  walk  with  me  and  share  my 
life." 


136       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

This  is  not  only  real  religion,  but  the  highest 
sense.  A  man's  wife  is  either  no  real  wife  at  all 
or  she  is  the  very  heart  of  his  heart  and  the  life 
of  his  life.  To  choose  her  carelessly  is  to  invite 
upon  himself  the  greatest  disaster  which  can  fall 
upon  a  man  short  of  the  loss  of  his  own  character. 
And  he  will  find  it  no  easy  matter  to  keep  his  char- 
acter if  he  makes  serious  mistake  as  to  her's.  All 
that  a  man  buys  is  as  nothing  to  his  choice  of  a 
wife.  Better  far  that  he  should  all  his  life  spend 
his  money  with  his  eyes  and  ears  shut  than  that  he 
should  choose  a  wife  without  the  utmost  exercise 
of  his  best  sense,  and  then  an  earnest  prayer  for 
the  saving  grace  of  God  to  preserve  him  against 
himself.  And  the  woman  has  need  of  even  greater 
caution,  for  the  average  woman  is  better  qualified 
to  make  at  least  a  tolerable  wife  than  is  the  average 
man  to  make  a  decent  husband.  The  average  wo- 
man outdares  Columbus  when  she  lets  loose  from 
the  moorings  of  her  own  home  and  ventures  out 
upon  the  matrimonial  sea.  Yet  many  a  girl  picks 
out  a  husband  with  less  caution  than  she  would 
exercise  in  buying  a  spring  hat. 

A  man  ought  not  only  to  be  careful  in  choosing 
a  wife,  but  he  ought  to  be  even  more  careful  to 
make  himself  worthy  of  her.  It  is  the  height  of 
impertinence  for  any  man  to  ask  any  woman  to 
marry  him  unless  he  is  all  that  he  might  be  in 
effort  and  intention,  at  least.  The  colossal  conceit 
of  many  a  young  man  in  asking  a  woman  to  give 


The  Gospel  and  Home-Making  137 

herself  to  his  care  and  keeping  when  he  is  so  wholly 
irresponsible  that  he  is  not  fit  to  be  trusted  with  the 
care  and  keeping  of  a  dog  and  a  wheelbarrow  is 
enough  to  excite  the  laughter  of  angels,  if  it  were 
not  so  much  more  provocative  of  tears.  Would 
that  every  young  man,  before  he  proposes,  might 
read  often  those  rebuking  words  of  Elizabeth  Bar- 
rett Browning,  speaking  for  her  sex  and  not  for 
herself: 

"  Do  you  know  you  have  asked  for  the 

costliest  thing 

Ever  made  by  the  Hand  above? 
A  woman's  heart,  and  a  woman's  hand, 
And  a  woman's  wonderful  love." 

And  all  that  follows.  It  might,  at  least,  impress 
him  for  the  moment  with  the  marvelous  confidence 
which  any  man  has  who  takes  a  woman's  life  and 
love  as  his  own;  a  venture,  indeed,  so  daring  that 
"  fools  rush  in  "  where  angels  might  well  "  fear  to 
tread,"  and  where  no  man  should  tread  who  is 
not  fit. 

There  is  no  greater  victory  that  the  gospel  can 
have  in  modern  life  than  the  redemption  of  the 
home.  It  is  more  important  because  more  funda- 
mental than  the  conquest  of  politics  and  business 
and  education  and  literature  for  Christ.  These  will 
all  follow  upon  a  truly  Christian  home  life,  or  will 
grow  easily  and  naturally  out  of  the  same  stem  of 
pure  purpose  and  finest  self-culture.  Nor  is  the 


138       The  Gospel  at  Work  in  Modern  Life 

redemption  of  the  home  a  matter  of  marrying  at 
this  or  that  age,  with  this  or  that  amount  of  money, 
or  with  so  much  or  so  little  regard  for  social  lines. 
It  is  much  more  than  all  these  matters  which  must 
be  determined  severally  by  careful  exercise  of  the 
best  sense  with  regard  to  all  the  circumstances. 

Specific  advice  here  is  of  little  worth,  except  as  it 
applies  to  specific  circumstances,  and  even  then  it 
is  worth  much  or  little,  according  to  the  measure 
of  a  man's  independence  of  it.  If  he  has  not  sense 
to  make  it  needless,  it  is  very  doubtful  whether  he 
will  have  sense  to  use  it.  The  redemption  of  home 
life  means  a  larger  valuation  upon  the  home  and 
home-building  first  of  all,  a  valuation  which  will 
manifest  itself  in  the  highest  type  of  seriousness. 
It  means  more  exercise  of  Christian  common  sense 
upon  the  part  of  young  people,  especially  in  choos- 
ing their  companions  and  partners.  It  means  much 
of  Christian  forbearance  and  forgiveness  in  making 
the  inevitable  adjustments  after  marriage  is  entered 
upon.  It  means  the  daily  application  of  the  gospel 
to  daily  living  under  the  severest  test  conditions 
oftentimes,  and  always  with  regard  to  the  highest 
type  of  Christian  conduct.  Home-building  requires 
the  very  best  material  to  be  had  in  the  way  of  indi- 
vidual Christian  character.  And  it  is  worth  all  the 
cost  of  it,  for  he  who  builds  and  maintains  a 
really  Christian  home  has  established  a  kind  of 
heavenly  experimental  station  on  earth,  a  little  king- 
dom of  God  which  is  the  best  analogy  we  know  of 


The  Gospel  and  Home-Making  139 

for  that  universal  and  everlasting  kingdom  which  is 
to  be. 

*** 
Quiz 

i.  What  is  one  of  the  commonest  causes  of  di- 
vorce to-day?  2.  Is  there  any  justification  for  the 
light  and  humorous  fashion  in  which  most  of  us 
refer  to  love  and  marriage?  3.  What  is  cynicism? 
4.  What  are  the  principal  reasons  which  favor  mar- 
riage as  the  normal  state  of  men  and  women?  5. 
What  apt  comparison  is  used  to  illustrate  a  good 
marriage?  6.  What  is  fairly  involved  in  a  man's 
making  himself  worthy  to  be  a  husband?  7.  In  a 
woman's  making  herself  worthy  to  be  a  wife?  8. 
What  relation  is  there  between  the  building  of  the 
Christian  home  and  the  social  welfare? 

Topics  for  Further  Study 

i.  The  growth  of  the  divorce  evil,  here  and  in 
foreign  lands,  causes  and  cure.  2.  The  influence  of 
the  popular  novel  in  stimulating  or  correcting  false 
views  of  love  and  marriage.  3.  The  value  of  the 
church  as  a  meeting  ground  for  the  sexes.  4.  Does 
the  broadening  of  woman's  sphere  work  toward 
more  intimate  and  helpful  companionship  in  the 
home,  or  away  from  it?  5.  Some  notable  instances 
of  Christian  marriage. 


14  DAY  USE 

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